


Trickster's Gambit

by willowbeecat



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Stargate SG-1, Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-28
Packaged: 2017-11-16 00:09:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbeecat/pseuds/willowbeecat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione accidentally activates something she really shouldn't have and finds herself in another world entirely. Gabriel uses a new player on the board to his advantage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I neither own nor make a profit from Harry Potter, Supernatural, or Stargate.  
> Pairings: Eventual Hermione/Mini-Jack, probably Sam/Cassie Fraser and Dean/Jo  
> Spoilers: Everything for all three series.  
> Timeline: Begins the summer before Deathly Hallows and roughly six-seven years pre-series for Supernatural. Heavy spoilers for Supernatural, particularly "In The Beginning" and "The Song Remains The Same." Heavy spoilers for "Fragile Balance."  
> Author's Notes: Why this way? I just don't realistically see Supernatural and Harry Potter existing in the same universe without some really complicated explanations. And I wanted to write about what Mary Winchester might have done if she'd survived instead of John. The Stargate crossover will start in chapter seven. I have up to chapter eight written and I will be posting one chapter every couple days until I have posted up to chapter six. This story is also posted at ff.net under the penname Willow-Bee the Cat. In case you're wondering, I haven't posted most of my chaptered stories here because they need to be edited, badly.

* * *

Hermione let out a groan as she slowly regained consciousness. The bed was rather uncomfortable and her arms in a position which was causing her to cramp. Realizing that her arms were somehow being held in place above her head, she froze.

What had happened? This certainly wasn't her bed. The last thing she remembered was going to visit the local library to research what she'd need to know if she, Harry, and Ron ended up having to survive off the land during the upcoming Horcrux hunt. Mary-her mother-had made sure that Hermione knew how to survive in more urban settings and even how to track something in both urban settings and the wilderness, but Hermione had never had to live off the land before. There were too many witnesses and too many possible victims to risk hiding in a town or city on a long term basis. It might be a viable option for others, but Hermione was well aware that Harry was at the top of Voldemort's list and Hermione and Ron by association and as a result they would be heavily hunted.

There'd been a flash of light and then… The seventeen, soon to be eighteen year old paled. Somebody had hit her with a spell and kidnapped her. They were probably Death Eaters and considering the things she'd read about what said Death Eaters had done-at least before Leonard Johnston, the editor of the Daily Profit was murdered in 1972-painted a terrible picture of what fate awaited her.

Nobody would know anything was wrong, Hermione realized. At least not until she failed to show up at the Weasleys' home. Her mother had died several months earlier, according to Uncle Mark and Uncle Mark knew that she intended to go to ground at a moment's notice and wouldn't think anything odd about Hermione disappearing off the face of the Earth. Hermione's father had died when Hermione was barely more than a toddler and Uncle Mark-her mother's… business partner-pretended to be Mark Granger in front of the Wizarding because Mary had been warned by Tamar Marshall-an Obliviator who later became one of Mary's good friends-after one of Hermione's incidents of accidental magic as a child that Wizarding society as a whole looked down upon both unmarried and divorced single-mothers. Hermione had already discreetly put the word out about her plan to obliviate her "parents" and send them to Australia as Monica and Wendell Wilkinson to some of the members of the Order of the Phoenix in the hopes that either they'd accidentally let it slip or they'd reveal it if captured and tortured by the enemy. If even one Death Eater was sent to find her parents, then in Hermione's mind the ruse would be worth it.

Hearing nothing to suggest that anybody else was there, Hermione cautiously opened her eyes. She was laying flat on the floor, facing what looked like a ceiling with visible support beams. Judging by the construction, it wasn't all that modern a building. She looked to her left and saw odd markings upon the ground and walls, and the same to her right, as well as behind her and in the direction of her feet. Her arms were tied up with a rope and secured to a metal ring embedded in the floor, her legs secured in similar fashion to another ring, stretching her body so tightly between the two rings so that she could not bend her arms or legs more than a couple centimeters.

The markings suddenly made coalesced into a picture that made vague sense and in one awful moment Hermione realized what her captors intended. First Hermione tried to slip her hands or feet out of the ropes, only to realize whoever had tied her up had been too skilled and she'd be unable to do so. Panic set in and she struggled desperately against her bonds until her wrist and ankles were bruised and bleeding. Hermione would not just lay there and let those monsters use her as a human sacrifice. She would not allow them to use her body and soul to summon and control something. Not a demon-that didn't require a human sacrifice, just the demon's human remains-or a "god"-that was a far more difficult and complicated procedure. It had to be for one of the eldritch horrors trapped in Purgatory. There was a good reason why people who'd attempted such things in the past-like H.P. Lovecraft and his ilk-had gone completely insane. Some things were not meant for the human realm. Nothing good could come of this. Such creatures were essentially magical nuclear weapons and had been banned by the Wizarding rules of war since Minoan Wizarding society had destroyed itself several millennia prior. Nobody in their right mind wanted something like that to happen again.

But Voldemort wasn't in his right mind. From what research Hermione had done, she knew that creating even one Horcrux split a person's sanity along with their soul. Tom Riddle had essentially driven himself crazier than he was originally each time he'd created a Horcrux. Considering the sheer hypocrisy of his rhetoric and the signs of instability he'd shown from a young age, the man probably hadn't thought it all that big a sacrifice, assuming he'd known. It wasn't like Riddle had had access to the books in the Black family library or even to Mary's contacts. Mary had known somebody-Hermione didn't know who he was-who'd been able to find a couple references and stories about Horcruxes in Muggle legends and myths. Mark had delivered the research to Hermione the day after the Hogwarts Express had taken her back to London.

The realization that she had no wand on her only made her calm. Her captors had taken her wand, but was that the only weapon they'd taken off her body? Hermione had always kept several other weapons on her at all times after the basilisk incident. Her petrification had only proven the wand an unreliable weapon and with her mother's help, Hermione had found a couple weapons she could both use and carry discretely. Given Lockhart's proclivities, Hermione had also talked Aunt Tamar into teaching her the mind arts-although while she knew the theory she'd never actually manipulated anyone's memories before-and the basics of wandless magic. Hermione had no idea why Harry found learning occlumency so difficult, but was rather sure it was a combination of bad study habits and the mutual dislike/hatred between him and Professor Snape.

Wandless magic was not an option-in combination with the blood she'd inadvertently spilled, she might accidentally activate the ritual circle. That left one of her knives. From the feel of it, the knife she ordinarily kept in her right boot was gone and the one strapped to her left thigh was as well. Hermione shuddered slightly, realizing she was naked, somebody having removed her clothing. The only other option was the caltrops braided into her hair. A caltrop was made of twisted spines with sharpened edges. Normally they were used against troops or horses or cars, but these caltrops were small enough and discrete enough to be hidden in her hair. There were half a dozen equally spaced caltrops, with centimeter long iron spikes inlaid with silver along the length of her braid to make it both painful and dangerous for an attacker to use her waist length hair as a hand hold. Mary had always been against a woman keeping her hair more than a couple inches past their shoulder unless they constantly kept their hair in some sort of up do and had insisted on Hermione using the caltrops if she were going to grow her hair out.

The caltrops weren't the best for cutting, but the rope around her wrists was relatively thin and the tips of the spikes were very sharp.

Hermione lifted her shoulders up off the ground and flipped her head, trying to free her braid out from under her body. She did it twice, until the braid was in a pile under her head. Then she let her shoulders back down and jerked her head. The braid didn't quite reach, given that her hair was tightly braided and as a result much shorter when braided than when loose. She stretched her body as far as she could and inched her body up as far as she could until her elbows were slightly bent. Hermione jerked her head until the tip of the braid landed on her wrist.

With a sigh of relief, Hermione pulled the braid up and turned it so that the spikes faced the rope. She carefully set about piercing the rope, cutting one strand, and then another until only a couple threads remained. It was a little harder, but she managed to cut several of those threads. The rest snapped, allowing the rope around her wrists to slacken. Hermione quickly freed her wrists and sat up. It took her little time to untie the ropes around her ankles.

She went to apparate, only to let out a groan. She couldn't use magic, couldn't take the risk of apparating in this room.

Hermione wasn't exactly keen on going anywhere naked, but it wasn't like she had much of a choice in the matter. At least she was relatively sure that nothing particularly untoward had happened while she was unconscious. Well, she had none of the aches she'd come to associate with sex and there were no other signs, leading her to hope that her captors had not done something to her unconscious body. She let out a small, mirthless laugh before abruptly stopping herself.

There was only a single door and two windows, boarded up securely from the inside, so Hermione went to check the door. It was locked and she had no lock picks or hair pins on her, leaving her trapped. The hinges were on this side of the door, however. Hermione bit her lip, examining the hinges. Maybe she could take those pins out…

She pulled down a curtain, taking the curtain rod with it. Hermione bit the cloth of the thin curtain and ripped it, removing the side with the curtain rings in one neat movement. It took but a minute to shake the dust off the curtain and then wrap it around her body and tie it over one shoulder like a beach wrap. Over that she tied the rope around her waist like a belt to keep it in place. She picked up the curtain rod and tested its weight before deciding it had a nice heft and weight to it which would work well as a makeshift weapon without being too heavy for her to reasonably use. She checked the curtain rings before pulling one out to use to pry out the hinges. Like the spikes of her caltrops, it was too thick to use to pick the lock, unfortunately.

There was the sound of heavy steps, coming closer to the door. Hermione plastered herself against the wall behind the door.

There was a pause once the door opened, followed by a voice she faintly recognized as belonging to Marcus Flint demanding, "Where the hell did Granger go?"

"What do you mean?" asked Adrian Pucey, pushing Marcus into the room. "Where'd the little bitch go?"

It was then that Hermione struck. She rammed into the door, causing it to hit Adrian hard before bashing Marcus over the head with the curtain rod. Hermione hit Marcus in the stomach and stepped back, looking toward the door only to pale. The tip of Adrian's wand glowed as he let loose a spell.

In an instant the runes and sigils began to glow as the array activated. Hermione started to shake in fear as magic crackled over her skin. Through some fit of sheer stupidity, Adrian and Marcus seemed not to notice what was happening. Or maybe they just didn't care.

Hermione ducked out of the way of the spells before throwing herself at the door.

"Make sure she doesn't get away," ordered Marcus.

Adrian slammed the door shut, the sound of locks clicking into place echoing throughout the room. Nonetheless, he asked, "What are we going to do?"

"We can still salvage this."

All the while, Hermione backed away, edging toward the windows. They looked like they'd been securely blocked off, but maybe she could work a couple boards loose.

These idiots were trying to summon something like the Mother or Cthulu or even worse, a Leviathan. The last time a Leviathan had been summoned from Purgatory, the city of Atlantis had been destroyed along with a good portion of Minoa before they'd managed to put it back. Hermione had no idea if there was even a way to kill the damn things.

No, she had to do something, stop this before things got even worse.

The array had already been activated and there was no way to stop it completely. Maybe she could… redirect the magic somehow. It was incredibly dangerous to change an array when it was in the process of being used, but it was possible.

Hermione glanced at the array, trying to find a place where she could add or subtract something and change how the entire array worked. Arithmancy equations raced through her mind before she remembered something she'd seen in the Black's library the summer before Fifth Year. Hermione made a decision. She didn't quite remember what it did, but it had to be better than this. Like as not, it would kill her, but if it stopped Death Eaters from summoning something from Purgatory, it would be worth it. She would not let these men loose something like that on her friends, on the innocent people of this country.

Using one of the caltrops, Hermione split open one of the wounds around her right wrist. She tucked the curtain rod under one arm and began to draw a rune with her blood, intertwining her magic with that of the array as she went.

Marcus hit her with a spell, but it was only absorbed into the array, adding to its growing power. Hermione used the protection the array temporarily granted her to draw another rune in an equally strategic position before the men managed to gather their wits. Adrian rushed her and Hermione struck out, hitting him in the throat. He fell to the ground coughing helplessly as he attempted to breathe. Hermione ran to the center of the room. She managed to paint the final rune in the center of the array a moment before some sort of weight hit her.

As Hermione slipped into unconsciousness, she realized that Marcus had tackled her.

* * *

There were so few that traveled between worlds these days that he could not help but notice the feeling of somebody slipping into this dimension. Whoever had done it had actually remembered to use the proper enochian symbols and the ritual to transport their body as well instead of just their consciousness.

Gabriel couldn't help but investigate.

It took him but a moment to find the beings responsible, but he would never had expected what he found.

Three fully realized nephilim lay scattered about a small clearing near a small town in Suffolk. Instead of the weak psychics and angelic vessels nephilim-the descendents of the children resulting from dalliances between humans and angels-had become, these were nephilim with full access to their powers and abilities and something faintly resembling training. Although he wasn't sure he liked what he saw of this training in their memories.

In this dimension, nephilim had been deemed too powerful by Lucifer and he'd had his forces kill off as many of them as possible. Those who hadn't died had had their powers bound by other demons, leaving them with little in the way of power. Most were merely possible angelic vessels. Some were capable of using what little abilities they had, becoming psychics, but those were few and far between. This trio was obviously from a dimension where Lucifer had no managed to do anywhere near as much damage.

The men were idiots, barely a step above demons in Gabriel's mind. But the woman… the woman was interesting. She had potential.

Gabriel was well aware about Lucifer's little plan to be let out of the cage a couple millennia early. He was equally aware of Michael's desire to go along with this, and even his manipulation of Mary Campbell and John Winchester by the those annoying little cupids to create the right vessels so that he and Lucifer could duke it out, never mind that the Apocalypse wasn't scheduled to take place just yet.

If his brothers wanted to play games… well, Gabriel felt he might as well join in. This woman was more than capable of throwing a spanner in the works. Although she couldn't do much as she was right now. But it wouldn't take all that much to change things to better suit his plans.

* * *

Hermione didn't quite expect to wake up again. At least she was on a bed, Hermione supposed. It took her a little longer to recognize the antiseptic smell of doctors offices and hospitals everywhere. Cautiously she opened her eyes, taking in that she was in a hospital with a great deal of relief.

Alright… she'd been kidnapped and almost used as a human sacrifice and then she'd used her own blood and magic to change the array so that it did something other than summon something from Purgatory. But what did she do? Hermione was very intelligent, but she didn't have an eidetic memory, so with the aid of her occlumency skills she attempted to reconstruct what had happened.

For some reason it was difficult for her to concentrate. Damnit. She'd been a painkiller of some sort. A serious one, judging by how off she felt. Pain killers always made her feel a bit loopy. The ones she'd been given when her mother had stitched the wound caused by Dolohov in the Department of Mysteries had had her singing Dolly Parton songs-her love of country music was something she almost never spoke about, it was something private she and her mother had shared.

She wouldn't be able to think until the pain killers cleared from her system. With a mental shrug, Hermione began to hum a song she thought was called _'All the Gold in California.'_ She loved that song. Hermione drifted off to sleep around the second chorus of _'Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me.'_

Hermione wasn't sure how much time had passed, but when she next awoke, a nurse was checking her over. The nurse clucked over her, saying something about her having gone through a terrible ordeal and being such a "poor dear." The nurse sent in a pair of cops not long after.

She couldn't quite focus her eyes on the detectives and her concentration wavered enough that though she knew they were called Greer and Hollis, she had no idea which was which.

"Can you tell me your name?" asked one of them.

"Hermione." It was Hermione. It was always Hermione. Even when everything else changed, her given name was always Hermione.

"… mother's name?"

Hermione's brow wrinkled, trying to figure out the question. Oh, the man wanted to know her mother's name as well. "Elaine. It's Elaine Cooper." That was the name Mary was using now, right?

"No, Mommy isn't married," she said. That's right. She was supposed to say that Mary was either divorced or had never married, depending upon current cover story. She was never to admit that Mary was a widow. "At least not to my dad. She says she's married to Uncle Mark sometimes."

"Who's Uncle Mark?"

Hermione shrugged. "Uncle Mark and Mommy work together and sometimes they say he's my dad and he and Mommy are married but they're really not."

"Why would they do that?"

"It's not right for a woman to have a child out of wedlock. So Uncle Mark lies to protect me and Mommy."

The detectives shared a look before they questioned her about her father again.

"I don't have a dad," insisted Hermione.

"But doesn't everybody have a father?" said one of the men.

"Yes," conceded Hermione.

"Surely there's something you can tell us about him."

"I don't have a dad," she amended. "But I do have a father." The officer cajoled her a bit until finally Hermione admitted, "His name's John Winchester. But I don't use his name. I use Mommy's name."

She hadn't used the Winchester name or acknowledged John Winchester or Roseanne Winchester's existence since the fire. Hermione had barely been four years old at the time, but she would always remember her mother literally picking her up out of her bed and running out of the house a moment before it had exploded into flames. John and Roseanne-Hermione's four month old sister-had not survived.

It was then that Hermione had learned the truth. It was then that Hermione had learned that the supernatural was real and that once, her mother had been a hunter.

After that, Mary had fled the country, Hermione in tow, and gone to stay with a couple members of the extended Campbell family in the United Kingdom. Shortly thereafter Mary had gone to ground, doing everything she could to hide from the demons that came after Hermione with terrifying regularity. Hermione had had dozens of names and identities by the time she entered Hogwarts. Mary had initially tried to stay out of hunting, but had given in nearly a year after the fire and started hunting again, admitting that her desire for a normal life had been selfish.

It wasn't until the summer following Hermione's Third Year that she'd learned about Mary's dealings with Azazel, one of Lucifer's generals. After hearing about how Hermione had almost been Kissed by a dementor, Mary had pulled out the good alcohol and they'd gotten drunk together. That night, Hermione had heard the strangest tales of Dean and Sam, her time travelling brothers that might-have-been and the miscarriage Mary had had thanks to some sort of monster attacking them. As a result Dean had never been born and later, Mary had made sure that the second child she'd conceived could not have been Sam. Hermione would have considered the story too fantastical to believe, if not for her experience with the Wizarding and the time turner. Mary and Hermione had never spoken of such things again, but Hermione would never forget.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve Wandell is from Supernatural. He was a hunter murdered by Sam when he was possessed in Season 2, I think. Hopefully, you know what Daniel Elkins is.

* * *

Hermione wasn't really sure what woke her up, but could only later assume it had been her magic attempting to protect her. She was only one of several patients in the room, although privacy curtains did ensure that the other patients neither bothered her nor even saw her. The occasional chatter during the day was a bit annoying, but Hermione could tune it out.

Unsure of why she'd woken, Hermione reached out with her senses. The only form of wandless magic she had any real skill in was the mind arts. Hermione was a natural occlumens. Legilimency was a bit more difficult for Hermione, but infinitely easier than apparition or what Hermione could only call telekinesis, which Tamar had insisted she learn even if she attempted no other form of wandless magic. How Harry had had such difficulty learning occlumency she didn't know. It was so easy for her, but she supposed that not everybody could have natural occlumency shields.

Her magic touched the minds of the four other patients in the room and slid off them once she'd confirmed they were not the reason for the disturbance Hermione had felt. She stretched her legilimency probe out farther, encompassing first the floor, and then the entire hospital. On that scale, it was impossible to differentiate one person from another, but it was possible to narrow down where the disturbance was… or in this case was not. It took a bit of time and a lot of patience, but Hermione managed to exclude the people technically within the hospital. The disturbance was in the parking lot, it seemed.

Tentatively, Hermione withdrew her senses from the hospital and focused it on the parking lot. There was no way Hermione would be able to go past surface thoughts at this distance without eye contact, but hopefully surface thoughts would be enough. Thankfully she was on a much weaker pain killer now that actually allowed her to think properly. Hermione had been a bit surprised to realize that her collarbone was broken and her wrist fractured, leaving her left arm both in a cast and a sling. Hermione touched the disturbance's mind only to jerk back in shock.

There was a person possessed by a demon in the parking lot.

Hermione reached out again, touching the mind tentatively. It was focused on something, someone in the hospital. A hunter, Hermione realized. The demon was after a hunter in the hospital. She pressed gently, delicately slipping into the demon's mind. Normally, such a thing was incredibly dangerous, but the pentagram tattoo above her heart made it impossible for her to be possessed by a demon, meaning it could not use her legilimency probe to follow her back to her body and possess her. Hermione managed to catch the name Steve Wandell before slipping out of the demon's mind. Even if it couldn't use her probe against her, she'd no desire to spend more time in its mind than absolutely necessary.

With a name, Hermione searched the hospital once more, starting with the emergency room and then the ICU, as they were the most likely places a hunter would be. It was easy enough to find a person if you knew their name. The man was not in either, so she moved on, giving a general sweep of the hospital. Hermione was a little stunned when she found the man in the maternity ward. Oh… his daughter had just given birth.

She contemplated removing the I.V. from her arm, almost dismissing the idea before she realized that if she got into the middle of a fight it could be used against her. It took her but a moment to properly remove the I.V. Hermione went to stand, only to stop short. For the first time since awakening in this hospital, she realized she was much smaller than she should be. A glance down was enough to confirm that underneath her hospital gown her breasts and hips were gone. Instead of the body of an adult, her body was now that of a child.

Was this a result of her interference with that rune array? No… the array didn't do that. It did something else… it… it transported whoever was standing in it from one dimension to another. Hermione felt the blood drain from her face. She'd been transported to an alternate dimension.

Focus. She had to focus. After the demon was dealt with, she could figure out exactly what had happened and where Marcus and Adrian were.

Hermione found a pair of pajama bottoms in the small closet built into the wall next to her bed and a pair of slippers that looked like they might fit. She pulled on both before leaving her curtained off cubicle. She would have walked straight out, but she saw something on a little table in what looked like a play area near the door. Hermione picked up the box of crayons, slipping them into her sling and going on her way. With no wand or practical weapons, the crayons were unfortunately her best bet.

It was a little after three in the morning according to the clock she'd passed and there was almost nobody about. A simple mental suggestion kept the doctors and nurses from noticing her as she went to the elevator and then up to the sixth floor.

Once on the proper floor, Hermione paused in front of the elevators. They were one of two banks of elevators in the building. Hermione removed a blue crayon and pealed off the label before using her magic to lift it to the ceiling. Hermione had long ago memorized the many and varied forms of devil's traps and how each worked. It was a bit difficult to get the level of pressure right, but Hermione managed to draw a circle, with a pentagram and appropriate symbols within above the normal elevators and service elevators before finding all four stair cases and drawing devil's traps above them as well. She went to the entrance to the maternity ward and pulled out the white crayon which was only a shade brighter than the ceiling tiles. Hermione used it to draw a full heptagram devil's trap. More specifically, it was made up of two pentacles of the lesser Key of Solomon and had a far more powerful effect on demons.

A quick check showed that the demon was still on the first floor. Good, she had time.

Hermione glanced about, before seeing an elderly woman in a small break room with a coffee maker and various supplies with a rosary in hand. Perfect. The Campbells-well, the hunter branch of the Campbells at least-were almost entirely Catholic.

Hermione let the magic hiding her fade as she approached the woman. Transfiguring a rosary wouldn't work unless it was permanent transfiguration and Hermione had neither the power to spare nor the skill for it at the moment. If she'd a wand on her, that would have been a different story.

"Ma'am?" Hermione said shyly, ducking her head so that her mid-thigh length hair fell over her shoulders, hiding her face slightly. She really needed to cut off about a foot of hair, but that could wait until later.

"Yes dear?" said the woman, with an accent Hermione couldn't quite place. "Shouldn't you be in bed?"

"I had a nightmare and I wanted to pray but I don't have my rosary. Do you know where I can get one?" It was a risk, but having a rosary meant she could make holy water, and she needed every possible advantage right now.

"I don't think the gift shop will open until eight or nine," said the woman. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a metal ring with a small cross and ten knobby bits of metal jutting out of the ring's perimeter. It was a simple, basque ring rosary, but it was more than enough for her purposes. "Here, you can have this."

"Thank you ma'am," said Hermione gratefully accepting the ring.

"You should go back to bed."

"Have a good night," she said, leaving the room.

A little further down the hallway, Hermione found the right room. She knocked on the door loudly. "Mr. Wandell, are you there?"

The door was yanked open. Hermione looked up, more than a little annoyed by how short she was, to see a rather tall man in layered flannel and denim, the typical uniform of hunters almost everywhere.

"What do you want, kid?" he demanded, looking down at her suspiciously.

"Somebody possessed by a demon is looking for you. It's in the hospital right now."

She didn't even flinch when the man pointed a gun at her. "How do you know that?"

"I can read minds," she pointed out. "Christo. You want to test me with salt and holy water as well? Or is that good enough for you?"

He uncapped a flask and handed it to her. "Drink."

Hermione couldn't help but roll her eyes, but she did as ordered. Most hunters were incredibly suspicious and paranoid, for admittedly good reason. It proved to be watered down alcohol-whiskey from the taste. Probably watered down with holy water. It was an old trick, but not much used these days.

He pulled out a knife edged in silver and motioned. With a sigh, Hermione held up her uninjured arm and allowed him to knick her skin. She didn't bother to react when he took out a salt packet and poured it into her hand. The various tests proving she was not a monster at least seemed to satisfy the man.

"Get in here, kid," said Steve. "What's your name, anyway?"

"Hermione." She shrugged, stepping into the room and allowing him to close the door behind her. "I'd tell you my surname, but it'd be a lie, so I won't bother, if that's alright with you." Hermione held out a crayon. "Here, if you want to put up a devil's trap. I already put them up over the elevators and the entrances to the stairs on this floor, but it'll figure out how to get up here eventually."

"How'd you do that?"

"Psychokinesis," she said nonchalantly. The term would explain more of her magical abilities than just telekinesis. "I can move things with my mind."

Hermione noted that there was a second man in the room, a sawed off shotgun in his lap sitting next to a rather exhausted looking woman in the hospital bed with an infant in her arms. At least there were two hunters here. As the woman was Wandell's daughter, she probably knew the basics of hunting, even if she weren't trained as a hunter. There were several schools of thought regarding the female relations of hunters. Some felt that women should remain civilians and be protected, others that they should at least know how to take care of themselves. The Campbells belonged to the third school of thought, namely that women should learn to hunt and be active hunters as their gender would not protect them from the monsters.

"Michael, call Danny. Tell him to get over here and call in any backup he can," ordered Steve. "Hermione here claims to be psychic. She says there's a demon in the hospital and it's coming for me."

"I have a rosary," she offered. "If you want to make holy water."

Michael picked up the room's telephone and began to dial while Steve asked her, "Do you know anything else about this demon?"

She shook her head. "I felt the demon. I didn't see the person it's possessing and the human inside was suppressed really deep. I didn't want to go into the human's mind and risk the demon sensing me. It's in the elevator now, though."

"You can feel it?"

"Hey Uncle Dan, it's Mike," said Steve's son-in-law, obviously paying some attention to their conversion.

Hermione nodded. "Yeah. I felt the demon and that's what woke me up. I'm not usually so good at feeling monsters, unless I'm looking for them." Her brow wrinkled. "I've never felt a demon without searching for it before."

"Come on kiddo," said the woman. "Grab that stack of paper cups and start filling them with water. You can turn them into holy water while the men find the demon."

"Yes ma'am," said Hermione , picking up the stack of eight paper cups and heading to the bathroom.

While she was there, she pulled the stopper on the sink and let it fill up with water between filling and blessing water in the cup. After turning the water in the sink into holy water, Hermione carried them into the room, setting two on the bedside table, three on the woman's tray, two on the window sill, and holding onto the final cup as though it were her drink. Mike and Steve had already left the room, presumably to find the demon.

"Do you want me to put up a devil's trap?" asked Hermione, holding out a pink crayon a couple shades brighter than the floor tiles.

"Put it in front of the door, on the ground."

"Alright."

Hermione put down her drink before doing as ordered. Azazel had seemed to have some personal vendetta against Mary and as a result, instead of meeting perhaps two or three demons over the course of a lifetime's hunting career, as was normal for most hunters, after the fire which had killed John and Roseanne, Mary and Hermione had met as between one and five demons a year from the time Hermione was four. Less than a week ago-well, she thought it was a week ago, but Hermione wasn't sure how long she'd been unconscious-Azazel himself had come to Hermione, offering to bring her mother back to life… in exchange for permission to enter her home one evening ten years later. Hermione had told him to go fuck himself, among other, far less polite things.

* * *

About halfway to the hospital, Daniel Elkins had received a second phone call from the Wandell family. This one was from Steve, who claimed that the demon had been dealt with and asked him to find out what he could about the psychic child who'd warned them, a Hermione Cooper. Well, that was her name according to the hospital files Mike had found, but apparently the girl had outright admitted that any surname she told them would be a lie.

Danny had been a hunter for the better part of forty years, having grown up in the business. In his experience, when somebody-usually a fellow hunter-admitted their name was a lie like this girl had, it meant that the person was wanted in most, if not all of the Lower Forty-Eight and that it was just as much for the person they were telling's protection as their own.

It didn't take much effort on his part to change into his FBI suit and grab appropriate badges before going to the police station. He entered the station, showed the badge when asked and was soon shown to Detectives Greer and Hollis who were working the case.

"So you're here about that Cooper kid?" said Hollis.

Danny nodded. "Yeah."

"Well, the girl was moved across state lines," Greer admitted grudgingly.

"Why don't you start with how she was found."

"One of the guests called in a disturbance at the Hillside Motel, Monday night-two nights back. Said they heard shots fired and what sounded like a child screaming," explained Greer. "When we got there, we found two men, both dead. They'd died within half an hour of our arrival according to the coroner. John Doe number one was shot through the head, John Doe number two was killed by a shot to the chest that punctured his lung. We think it was the same weapon-a .45. Ballistics hasn't gotten back to us yet. Neither of them put up much of a struggle. There were spell books all over the place and some sort of occult circle thing in one side of the room. The girl, Cooper, was found tied up in the center of the circle, unconscious."

Satanists? They occasionally performed human sacrifice. "Do you have any photos?"

An appropriate stack of photos, minus the girl were handed to Danny. The books were actual Satanist texts and he'd seen that particular sort of circle used before.

Had a hunter interrupted their ritual and then played the part of concerned citizen by calling it in to the police rather than take the girl directly to the hospital and be forced to answer uncomfortable questions? Some of them would do that so long as the victim wasn't too injured or if they hadn't dealt well with learning of the supernatural.

"What did the girl say happened?"

"According to Hermione," said Hollis. "She walked out of a library in Aberdeen-as in Aberdeen, Scotland-and they grabbed her. They pressed a funny smelling cloth to her face and she lost consciousness. When she woke up they had tied her up and tried to kill her, but she lost consciousness again and doesn't remember anything else."

"When they took her, she said it was June 24th, that was more than two weeks ago and she either doesn't remember what happened in between, or she doesn't want to talk about what happened," explained Greer.

"What sort of injuries does she have?" If the girl was as familiar with the supernatural as Steve thought, she might also be claiming ignorance rather than trying to fool them.

"Hermione has deep lacerations on her wrists and ankles from ropes. The doctor said she struggled so hard to get out of her bindings that she cut down to the muscle. She almost slit her wrists by accident and had to have stitches. Her left wrist and collarbone are fractured." Hollis shook his head. "Dr. Bernstein's more worried about her old injuries. He thinks she's been abused."

Danny looked up from the notes he was taking. "What sort of injuries?"

"From her x-rays, she's had about five broken ribs in the past, her right leg was broken some time ago and healed correctly. She has a number of scars along her body. There are five on her right outer thigh, like something clawed her up and one on her right arm that the doctor says severed some of her tendons and muscles, although it was properly repaired. There's a scar that runs diagonally across her chest from her right shoulder to the bottom left side of her rib cage, like somebody tried to cut her open that was then sewed shut by somebody without formal medical training." Hollis let out a disgusted sigh. "The girl is maybe eight, and she… somebody tattooed a pentagram on her chest, above her heart."

"A pentagram?" It was one of the only real ways to ensure you weren't possessed by a demon, but few hunters bothered to go so far. Most thought it wasn't worth it. Why would somebody have tattooed a little girl with one? Then again, Steve had said she was a hunter's child. Her family had probably thought it worth it.

"Doc says Hermione's had the tattoo for a couple months, at least," said Greer. "When she was brought in, they did a rape kit, just in case. Somebody raped that girl. Doc wasn't sure when it'd happened, but he said it might be one or both of the John Does, or it might be an older injury."

"Have you located her family?" asked Danny.

"She said her mother was Elaine Cooper, but the police over in the U.K. haven't found anybody who matches the woman's description and nobody has reported Hermione missing yet," explained Hollis. "We haven't had much luck finding her father either. The man is a John Winchester, originally from Lawrence, Kansas but he's some sort of survivalist and lives off the grid when his kids aren't in school." Summer break had already started, meaning that Sam was out of school.

That caused Danny to still. He'd trained a John Winchester a while back, but both names were so common, Danny couldn't be sure it was the same person. "You're sure he's her father?"

"No idea," shrugged Greer. "But his DNA is on file in CODIS and we sent a DNA sample from Hermione in to be tested. The girl knew the names of John's sons and their birthdays. Although she also said she had a younger sister named Roseanne, and we haven't found any record of her birth or death."

"What did she say the relationship between her parents was?"

"I think she's the product of a one night stand or maybe a fling," Hollis shrugged. "She'd only just gotten out of surgery at the time and was pretty out of it. She said something crazy about them meeting on a hunt except John didn't know it was a hunt and ended up in the middle of things. I asked her if her father would know the name Elaine Cooper and she said that wasn't her mother's name then. We think the woman either got married since then or perhaps divorced."

Or more likely, the woman had been a hunter using an alias. No wonder they couldn't find the right Elaine Cooper. It was probably the alias the woman was using when this happened. Danny found himself worried about her injuries. Particularly the rape. It might have been those Satanists. Some rituals required the human sacrifice to be defiled first. Or it might have been any of a number of other attackers. The Winchesters he knew attracted demons far more regularly than other hunting families, although John had only really encountered seven of them so far, ignoring the yellow-eyed demon which had killed his wife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About whether or not Hermione was raped; her body is currently about eight years old. She is not old enough to consent so far as the police or anybody else is concerned. Whether or not Hermione had consensual sex whilst in her normal, seventeen year old body, she is currently eight and they have assumed the worst. As for CODIS, I'm relatively sure it existed in 1997, although it wasn't anywhere near as extensive as it is now. Still, it is entirely possible that John's DNA would have been on file.


	3. Chapter 3

* * *

Sam and Dean were probably curious about why he'd abandoned the hunt, calling the Harvelle's Roadhouse and asking for Ellen to send somebody else to deal with the ghost. Not that either of his boys knew about the Roadhouse. All they knew was that they'd left a hunt only two days into it, something they'd never done before. John couldn't quite bring himself to answer their questions just yet. At least not until he knew the truth of what Dan Elkins had reported to him.

He'd left the boys at the motel with the most powerful protections he could think of and instructions to go no further than the pool. He'd given them instructions on how to exorcise demons, and told them to keep their guns close. Neither of the boys had been particularly happy with those instructions, but they'd obeyed, understanding that they were in a far more dangerous situation than normal.

At the elevators, he paused, wondering why the janitor munching on a donut looked so familiar. John shrugged it off, his mind on other things.

With more than a little trepidation, John walked into the elevator. It took what felt like an eternity to reach the proper floor and find Dan.

The description of injuries Dan had given him would have been horrifying for any child to experience. But children involved with hunters, even peripherally tended to experience horrors which civilian children did not, for all that those experiences may or may not have physically scarred.

He found Dan in a waiting room off the children's wing.

"John," Dan said in greeting. "The cops think I'm Garth Daniels, from the FBI."

"Got it," said John. "Do you think she's legit?"

"That girl is a powerful psychic," allowed Dan. "But when she gave the cops the information on you and your boys, the only hunters in the building were John Wandell and his daughter and son-in-law. None of them have even heard of you. She looks a bit like your boys and I believe her mother truly was a hunter, but I don't know if she's yours or not."

"What did you say her mother's name was?"

"Elaine Cooper. From Aberdeen. From what I've been able to gather, Elaine had a 'business associate' named Mark who was really her hunting partner. The man posed as Elaine's husband and Hermione's father when they were dealing with the authorities."

John nodded, thinking this information over. He didn't really remember anybody named Elaine, but he did remember a Scottish woman in a bar a decade earlier.

"I think I remember Elaine-I think she was a Gordon, not a Cooper at the time," admitted John. At least, he thought her surname had been Gordon.

It would have been more damning to claim to have no idea who the woman or her daughter was. He would protect his family, even from other hunters. And if this girl wasn't really family, he'd deal with her himself.

John took the room information and left before he had to make anything else up. It took but a moment to find the appropriate room. Hermione was in a room with six beds, most with curtains on tracks connected to the ceiling drawn back so the children were visible and a table on soft matting in a small play area by the entrance. John nodded at one of the mothers and made his way over to the bed in the middle to the right.

Like Sam, Hermione was a little on the chubby side, but she'd probably grow out of it in time. She had the longest hair he'd ever seen on a child the same shade of dark brown as his own, the ends curling into ringlets like his elder sister Kelly's had when allowed to air dry. She was pale, with features rather like Kelly's. She had Kelly's nose, chin, and basic facial shape, and pale skin. She was covered in freckles, like John's mother. In her relatively uninjured right hand was a copy of Pride and Prejudice, which had probably come from the bookcase next to the play area.

She looked up and blinked at him, as though unable to understand what she was seeing. Her eyes were the same shade of brown and general shape as Sam's he noted. The book slipped from her grasp, falling into her lap.

"Who are you?" she said, revealing a faint Scottish accent.

She was pale, shaking like a leaf. She seemed to be terrified of him. Perhaps she thought that he was a hunter sent to take care of the psychic before it was too old.

"I'm John Winchester," said John. He walked over to the bed and shut the curtains before they could attract even more attention. "Now then, I'd appreciate it if you told me your real name and your mother's real name."

She gave him a searching look, before saying, "My name is Hermione Maureen Gordon, although I've been going by Hermione Jean Granger at the school I most recently attended. My mother's name was Joan Gordon." Hermione shook her head. "Marcus Flint and Adrian Pucey, two upperclassmen-they graduated three, four years back-kidnapped me and attempted to use me as a human sacrifice to power a rather stupid attempt to summon and control some sort of monster from Purgatory."

"How do you know that's what they intended?"

"I read about it in a book." Hermione shrugged.

"Then what happened?"

"Another hunter burst into the room. He shot them and checked the room and made sure I wasn't dying and left me there." She pouted. "He didn't even give me a chance to explain that I knew about the supernatural before leaving me tied up in the middle of a ritual circle. Although the police did come a couple minutes later."

It matched what Dan had managed to find out relatively well. Although leaving the kid there had been rather irresponsible. "Can you tell me your birthday?"

"September 19th. I'll be nine this year."

John didn't like the idea of any daughter of his-and already, he's thinking of Hermione as his daughter-having sex. It would have been one thing if she'd been a teenager at the time. It was relatively normal for teens to do that. But she was barely much more than a baby. If whoever responsible wasn't already either dead or in prison, he would hunt them down and killed them. Slowly. Even now, he found himself fighting the urge to bring those Satanists back with a bit of necromancy and kill them again.

"I assume it you were born in 1988."

"Yes," she admitted. "I can see you're a hunter. Mom didn't say you were a hunter. Are my brothers learning to be hunters too?"

"I don't think Joan knew," said John. If Joan was who he thought she was, he had been in town so the boys could go to school, not for a hunt.

"Oh. How old are my brothers?"

"Dean's eighteen and Sammy just turned fourteen. Dean's entering his senior year and Sammy his freshman year of high school."

"I just finished fifth grade."

"Can you tell the cops that I've been paying your mother child support if they ask?" he said. It would make it easier to get custody of the girl if she was indeed his daughter. It would be simple enough to claim that neither he nor Joan had wanted to involve the courts by setting up a child support agreement.

"Alright," she agreed easily enough. Probably because she was used to telling lies. Most children of hunters were. "There… after Mom died, a demon came to me. He said that if I gave him permission to enter my home one night, ten years from now, he'd bring Mom back to life. I told him to go away. But I'm supposed to tell if a monster sees me."

"What did the demon look like?" demanded John.

"He had yellow eyes. I saw him once before, when Mom was hunting this other demon. She said his name is Azazel."

John collapsed into the chair. "Azazel?"

"He's one of Lucifer's generals. You can tell his rank because his eyes are yellow instead of black like the lower level demons."

"Joan raised you as a hunter?"

Hermione nodded. "We stayed with some family near Edinburgh until I was in kindergarten and then Mom started hunting again. Before that she just did research for the family. Found the hunts and so on. She teamed up with Uncle Mark-he and Mom met on a hunt when she was around sixteen or so and Uncle Mark said that she got somebody to teach him when he was first starting out. I'm not allowed to go on hunts until I'm eleven or twelve, but I travel with Mom unless it's too dangerous. Then I stay with Aunt Tamar. She and Uncle Mark got married last year."

Twelve, let alone eleven was far too young by John's standards, but he'd long ago figured out that the Campbells were one of the old hunting families. Between what he'd managed to read between the lines of Mary's childhood stories, all carefully edited at the time to exclude anything supernatural and what he'd heard from fellow hunters, they were fanatical about hunting. If Sam had any idea what sort of training Campbell children went through, he just might understand how kind John had been in training them.

From the sounds of it, Hermione's mother was likely from one of these old hunting families as well. He'd have to tell Sam and Dean about Mary, he realized. Perhaps then they might have a chance of understanding the brutal way Hermione had likely been raised by her mother. Those sorts of families believed firmly in the idea of "spare the rod and spoil the child." He'd been horrified by some of the things Mary had revealed about her childhood-even the censored stories had been terrible.

A terrible thought occurred to him. One of the problems about these old hunting families was that they rarely stayed still long enough for the police to investigate any reported crimes. He ignored the hypocrisy of this thought. Instead, he thought about how it was entirely possible that Hermione's attacker had been one of her cousins or uncles. Perhaps that was why Joan had chosen to work with this Mark person instead of her kin.

"How did she die?"

"They were in the Western Isles taking care of a wendigo. They got it, but Mom died from her injuries." Hermione shook her head. "I was with Aunt Tamar at the time because wendigos are too dangerous."

"Does your Aunt Tamar hunt too?" asked John.

Hermione shook her head. "She's a psychic. She taught me how to use my powers."

"You're a psychic?" He already knew that, but felt he might as well get it out of her himself. He wanted to know what she was capable of.

"I can read minds and move things with my mind," explained Hermione. "I can make things with my mind."

"Make things?"

She picked up a plastic straw off her table and stared at it until it twisted and melted. Sweat formed on her face, making it apparent that this was rather difficult for Hermione to do. It twisted itself into a ball and then reformed as a white plastic barrette. She used it to pin her hair back on one side.

"See. Like that."

John fought the urge to reach for a weapon. It had already been confirmed that Hermione was completely human. Although until now, he'd never thought a psychic might be capable of such things. Except… well, except for Maureen, but she was long dead.

"What did your mother think of you doing things like that?"

"I'm not the first psychic in the family," shrugged Hermione. "Mom says-said that psychics pop up every once in a while in her side of the family."

He remembered Mary joking about that once. But that fell to the wayside in the face of Hermione's little demonstration. Her powers were nowhere near so extensive as the trickster's but they were similar. Were psychics descended from tricksters or perhaps pagan gods in general? It seemed like it was a possibility. Perhaps it even explained why that damn trickster had left him alive, if a little worse for wear whenever they'd met.

Part of him wanted to get up and leave. Monsters should be killed, but psychics weren't monsters. Hermione-whatever she was-wasn't a monster either. If she was descended from a trickster, like her proclaimed abilities implied, it would explain why he'd managed to escape that trickster relatively unscathed whilst many other hunters had met their doom.

Mary wasn't the only person who'd had "psychic" relatives. John still remembered what had happened to Maureen, even if nobody else was willing to acknowledge it. For a long time he'd thought it his imagination, but after Mary and the fire, he'd been ready to admit the supernatural was real. Missouri had only confirmed what he'd feared.

Maureen had been one of his cousins. John had never spent much time with Maureen, but he'd heard his own and Maureen's mother speaking from time to time. It was little things, like Maureen getting into locked rooms or that time she ended up halfway up a tree even though the lowest branch had been a good four feet above the girl's head. John still remembered the way Billy-Maureen's older brother-had gone completely green after upsetting Maureen and that teacup that had turned into a turtle. It had taken days for the color to wash off his skin, although the turtle had never changed back, eventually wandering off into the wilderness. Maureen had been grabbed off the street by a woman whose eyes, John remembered far too well, had flashed black momentarily. She'd been seven when she'd died.

* * *

The last thing Hermione had expected was for John Winchester to come strolling through the door. Her father was dead and that man… that man reminded Hermione more of a shapeshifter than anything else.

She wanted to scream and shout, to throw something, but she wouldn't do that. At least not right now. Maybe later, when she was out of the hospital.

The entire time they'd been speaking, she'd been waiting to wake up. Surely it had to have been a dream. A bad dream. Except, it wasn't.

As it was, she had to resist the urge to kill somebody. Or curse somebody. It wasn't right. This John Winchester wasn't right. He wasn't her father. Her father had been a civilian, a mechanic. He was just a man wearing John Winchester's face.

The knowledge that Sam and Dean existed in this world was… troubling. She'd entered John's mind long enough to find that Mary was dead in this world, killed in the fire. She'd caught the name Gordon, in connection with some woman he'd slept with a decade ago-and she really hadn't wanted to know that-and run with it before she had a chance to rethink her strategy or contemplate telling him the truth.

She liked the idea of having brothers, but that didn't change the fact that according to Mary, Sam and Dean came from a time when the apocalypse was literally nigh. She wanted nothing to do with the apocalypse.

Oh… that's what she was trying to remember. There was something important about Azazel visiting Sam on his six month birthday. But whatever that was… it was beyond her right now. She'd probably figure it out later.

The apocalypse was infinitely more important than Voldemort and the Death Eaters, unfortunately. This world's problems were more important than the problems of her own world, she thought mournfully.

But what could she do about a probably apocalypse? It wasn't like she had access to her wand. However… she did know quite a bit on making potions. If she trained properly, she'd likely be able to relearn most of the spells wandlessly that she'd known before. Her attempt at transfiguration had proved that it was possible.

Wands were only focusing tools. Before wands had been in common use, most of the Wizarding had used potions, wandless magic, and enochian runes. Hermione was fluent in enochian and skilled enough in arithmancy-the mathematics of magic-to be able to translate spells and wand movements to runes as she went.

* * *

It was almost like a vacation and Sam seemed to be enjoying it, but Dean was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. John had been tense and on edge since their arrival several days prior and disappeared for hours at a time. Most of their time had been spent training, at the motel pool, or at the library-but only if they went together and were armed. They hadn't been this restricted in years. Perhaps the oddest part was that John didn't seem to care that Dean was now bald thanks to a hat which had been superglued to his head and Sam's hair dyed pink, thanks to their most recent prank war.

Still, it seemed that John had finally decided to fill them in on whatever was going on. He'd ordered them to the table next to the kitchenette in their room, pausing to blink at the sight of them-as if this was the first time he'd noticed their strange appearances-before sitting down.

"So what are we hunting?" asked Dean.

"We're not here for a hunt," said John, sitting down at the table.

"Then what are we here for?" said Sam, his tone just surly enough to get John's hackles up. Dean could just sense this was going to devolve into another argument.

"Your sister."

"Sister," gaped Sam.

"Who's her mother?" demanded Dean, even as his mind raced. He knew his father wasn't exactly celibate, but he would have thought the man would have at least remembered to wear a condom. John had reminded him to do the same often enough. "Why haven't we heard of her before?"

"Joan Gordon," explained John. "Your sister's name is Hermione. As Joan died on a hunt a couple weeks back, Hermione will be staying with us now. I didn't know about Hermione until week ago. However, if social services or the police ask, you know Hermione by name, even if you've never met or spoken to her before, and I've been paying her mother child support."

"Joan?"

"A hunt," said Dean, deciding to focus on that.

The instructions were simple enough to follow and made sense, all things considered. They'd been told to lie to people like that before, although most of the time, they had cover stories worked out before they came to town.

"Yes, a hunt." John let out a sigh. "Joan was a hunter, from a family of hunters, like your mother was. Hermione would have known about what's out there anyway. She's psychic."

"Psychic? How do we know she is who she says she is?" said Sam. It was a good question, one that Dean wished he'd thought to ask.

"The DNA results say she's mine," growled John. "And she's not the first psychic in either side of the family, for that matter."

"What?" said Dean. Legitimate psychics were incredibly rare. Dean had only met one before, several years prior.

"My cousin Maureen was psychic-a demon killed her when she was a kid."

"Maureen?" said Sam.

"I don't like to talk about her much, but her powers were almost identical to Hermione's. Although Hermione has more skill."

"Whoa, what?" said Dean, suddenly connecting what John had said. He couldn't be serious. Mom wasn't a hunter. "Let's get back to Mom being a hunter."

"Your mother's side of the family are hunters. Have been for centuries."

"Mom wasn't a hunter," snapped Sam. "She was normal, she was a civilian."

"No, she wasn't," stated John, face hard. "A lot of it only makes sense in retrospect, like the day your grandparents died." He went on to detail what little he knew of the incident, the longer he spoke, the more it sounded like something involving a demon. Even more horrifying was the mention of the yellow eyed demon.

He pulled out Mary's old charm bracelet from his bag and laid it on the table. Dean had seen it on occasion, but John had kept it close. Dean stared at the bracelet, taking in the silver it was made from, the dozen religious and protective symbols hanging from it.

"Mary… she used to tell me stories about her childhood, looking back, it should have been obvious they were edited to keep the supernatural out of it. I hadn't wanted to say anything to you about it, but I guess you're old enough to know the truth now."

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I wasn't very nice to the Campbells in this chapter. I think there had to be some reason why Mary wanted out, beyond just the hunting. Her father's obsession with bringing her back to life in Season Six didn't help. I just took the idea of these hunting families, with all their experience at avoiding the authorities to what I feel are natural extremes. How can the police or social services investigate neglect or abuse when they clear out of town so quickly? That's ignoring the relatively stationary hunters, of course. Although they would have alternate methods of protecting their privacy.


	4. Chapter 4

* * *

Hermione let out a sigh as she absently fiddled with a pencil and paper. She was so worried about Ron and Harry, but unfortunately there was nothing she could do for either of her boys. Dimensional travel was considered taboo for good reason and the Order of the Phoenix would shun her, if not worse for breaking that unspoken law just as easily as the Death Eaters would murder her for being Muggle-Born. Even if she could recreate the method of dimensional travel she'd used-which was a big if-there was no way to guarantee she would be able to control it enough to find her way back to her native dimension. Not to mention the possible apocalypse. She had to help her brothers. Family came first. Her boys were on their own now.

Pretending to be eight wasn't exactly fun, but she didn't know this John Winchester. She had no idea what sort of man he was or how hunting had affected him. Some people were driven crazy by that sort of knowledge. Until she knew, there was no way she'd willingly reveal her true age or intellect. Even uttering one little hint about how she was really related to them would probably cause a rather… adverse reaction. She didn't want to think about how they'd react if she brought up Mary.

She might have told the truth if not for the fact that by this point she was sure that she was stuck this way. Aging and deaging potions tended to wear off within a week. While permanent transfiguration could be use on Muggles, a witch or wizard's magical core would eventually break down and reverse the spells. If a person had goo enough control over their magical core, they could even speed up the process. Hermione had already checked, and this was not some sort of permanent transfiguration. That meant that either it was a curse or some odd form of magical interaction, neither of which could be reversed without risking her own life, at the very least. It just wasn't worth it.

At least she'd managed to think up a workable cover story. In all honesty, she didn't even need to lie all that much, other than to remember that she was now a Gordon and Mary was Joan Gordon. Everything else could easily be filled in with her real memories and experiences growing up. It was a lot simpler than pretending she was an ordinary witch, the daughter of rather boring dentists. Half the time she'd been at a loss of what to say to the boys, leading them to believe she was a rather bad liar when she was young.

Although given the way she'd managed to get Umbridge to practically hand herself over to the centaurs, she didn't know how they still believed that. Then again… her little Defense Association had not exactly been all that well thought out. It had never occurred to her that while she might have been used to meeting at seedy taverns to go over hunts with her mother and Uncle Mark and occasionally other hunters, that it was suspicious for nice upstanding students to do so and that it would come to Umbridge's attention. Not that she had really expected the group to last all that long before somebody-like Marietta-broke under the pressure and spilled to somebody, hence the relatively mild penalty. Among hunters, betrayal often resulted in death.

It was a little after nine when John returned, two teenage boys trailing behind him. It was odd, so odd seeing her civilian father as a hunter. He escorted them into her little cubicle and closed the curtains, glancing up at the devil's trap which took up almost the entirety of the ceiling above the cubicle and carefully drawn protective sigils around the perimeter approvingly.

"Good morning," she said, putting down her pencil. "Sam and Dean, right?"

"Yup," said the older boy, currently sporting a buzz cut.

"I'm Hermione." She took in the pink hair on the younger one. "So what happened to you two?"

"Prank war," said John, with a roll of his eyes. "I'm gonna leave these two with you while I talk to the police. I have an appointment with CPS-that's Child Protective Services-afterward. I'll come by after I'm done with the bureaucracy." Presumably he'd translated the title into words for her because in the U.K., it was called something else.

"Bye," said Hermione.

Dean waited until after John left to speak. "So… sister, huh?"

"Yeah," said Hermione.

"You're a hunter, too?" interjected Sam.

"No. Mom said I'm not allowed to hunt until I'm eleven or twelve. Other than the hunts I ended up in by accident. I guess now when I start hunting is up to Dad."

"By accident?" echoed Dean.

"Most of the time Mom and Uncle Mark took me along to hunts and left me in an apartment or motel room or library or something," said Hermione. After claiming her parents were dentists throughout Hogwarts, it was odd to speak the truth so easily. "I've had monsters go after me more than once while they were out hunting."

"Who's Uncle Mark?" asked Sam.

"Mom's hunting partner. Well, he was Mom's hunting partner."

"So, how is he related you?" asked Dean.

"He's not related to me at all. Mom met him on a hunt back when they were teenagers. He was in the country on vacation and got caught up in something he really shouldn't have. Ended up becoming a hunter. Mom got him an apprenticeship with somebody in the family. Our second cousin once removed, I think."

"So your mom's been training you as a hunter?"

"Yeah."

"What was your training like?" asked Sam.

"Training isn't so bad. Our-my cousins had it way worse. Mom was pretty mellow. She let me go to school and everything. Most of the rest of the family were home schooled." Hermione shrugged, doing her best to gloss over her little slip of the tongue and play it off as a simple mistake. "She said I could go to high school too. Most of my cousins never got more than the American equivalent of a tenth grade education at all."

"What?" said Sam, clearly horrified by the very thought. She could understand that. Education had always been very important to her.

Hermione nodded. "They… they think hunting is the be all and end all, you know? And most of them survive the way other hunters do-lying, cheating, and stealing, which isn't a bad thing (it's really the most practical way to support ourselves most of the time) but it's not a civilian job either-and they think that there's no point in getting too much education. Most hunting families are like that. Dad said your mom was a Campbell. Didn't you know that? I've met some Campbells who stayed behind in Scotland and they're really, really strict. In my family, most of the ones doing the home schooling left school once they were sixteen or were taught by somebody who did the same and they don't bother bringing in tutors for anything more advanced."

"Oh," said Sam, an oddly disturbed look on his face. "But you went to normal school, right?"

"I just finished fifth grade."

"Shouldn't you be going into fourth?" said Sam.

"I should," she shrugged. "Mom had me start a year early so she could get back into hunting sooner. I skipped from first to second grade and then third to fourth but I had to pretend to be two years older than I really was and a normal student after Azazel's psychotic little minion tried to kill me, so I ended up going through fifth twice."

"Azazel?" said Dean.

"He's the demon that killed my sister Rosie and offered to bring Mom back to life for me last month," she stated starkly. She didn't much like talking about him, but in this situation, Sam and Dean would need all the information she could give them.

"Does Dad know?" demanded Dean.

"I told him everything I know about him and the deal he offered."

Dean gave a short, tight nod. "Good." He slumped into a chair. "So… do you play poker?"

"Do I play poker?" said Hermione. Poker was only the international hunter pastime and favorite method of scamming people out of money. "Of course I play."

Even if she hadn't learned to cheat at cards and hustle poker-along with pool and darts-from her mother, she would have learned just to survive playing against Fred and George during the near monthly tournaments the twins threw in Gryffindor Tower. Those two knew some tricks that not even her cousin Gwen-the Campbell family card shark-was familiar with.

They were in their third game, playing for nickels and dimes when the curtain was pulled back. A woman in a suit paused at the sight of the group.

"Hermione Cooper?" said the woman.

"Yeah," said Hermione.

"What do you want with our sister?" demanded Dean, instinctively claiming Hermione as a member of his family.

She was a little surprised that he'd taken to her so quickly. He had been raised as a hunter, after all, and hunters almost never took well to strangers, even their fellow hunters. Although the DNA test had confirmed that she was his sister. Perhaps they followed the idea that family came before all else, just as Mary had. She'd likely told John her opinions on family, even if not the context it had come from. It would have fit well with the training John had gone through as a marine-"semper fidelis," or "always faithful," the marine motto was something they all understood-and along with his time in Vietnam… she could see how Dean and Sam might have been taught Mary's views on family by John.

"You are?" asked the woman.

"I'm Dean Winchester, that's my brother Sam," he explained.

"I'm Sarah Johnson, with CPS, Hermione's case worker," she explained. "Your father is John Winchester?"

Both boys nodded.

"And he is…"

"He's talking to the cops about Hermione," said Dean. "I think he's going to see CPS afterward."

"What are you two doing here?"

"Visiting."

"Right," she said, giving them this look like they were criminals. They were hunters in training, being raised by another hunter; they likely already had criminal records. "Why don't you two go get lunch while Hermione and I talk."

"Bring me back real people food," said Hermione. "And M&Ms, with peanuts!" At least now she wouldn't have to pretend her parents were obsessed with clean, healthy teeth and did not permit her to eat sugar except on rare occasion.

"Right," said Sam, grinning slightly at her request before glancing at the social worker and getting up to leave.

* * *

It was nearly three weeks after John and the boy's arrival that the police set her case to the side and a judge gave John custody of Hermione. Her cast had not yet come off, but her collarbone was healed and the stitches out, at least. After a tricky infection and some odd readings-that he was rather sure Hermione had accidentally caused with her powers in her panic about the idea of being put in foster care while custody was being decided-the hospital had decided to keep her much longer than they would have ordinarily.

John brought her a set of clothing from a thrift store and left her to change for a couple minutes. Once she was clad in the blue sundress-it was good for the weather and made it easier for her to dress with her cast-he helped her into a pair of socks and sneakers and tied her hair back in a messy ponytail. It wasn't exactly appropriate for hunting or even a relatively active child, but she'd be able to get proper trousers and shirts at a later date.

Hermione was sat down in a wheelchair and taken down to the entrance. Once out of the hospital, John took her hand to make sure she didn't wander off and took her to the car, carefully ignoring the way she'd flinched. As soon as he discovered who had attacked her, they were dead. John set her down next in the back passenger seat and went around to the driver's seat.

* * *

"We're here," said John, pulling up to a motel at the edge of town a couple minutes later. "I'll take you shopping for the basics this afternoon. Don't get too attached, we're heading out in the morning."

"Alright," said Hermione.

She was taken to their room, which was actually two rooms with a door between. There was a single with a large bed and a kitchenette, a table, and a couple chairs, connected by a door to a double, presumably being hers and the boys' room.

"Hi," said Hermione.

"Hey," said Sam, looking up from his book. John had threatened to shave Sam's head a week earlier and Sam had ended up dyeing his hair brown again rather than risk him going through with his threat. The shade was a little off, making it obvious to those who knew about the pranks that Sam's hair had been dyed, but it wasn't too bad.

"Thank God," said Dean. "I never want to see another social worker again."

"Were they that bad?" said Hermione.

"I think they might be in the need of some hunting."

Hermione giggled. "I'm sure they're not actually that evil."

"Yes, they are," insisted Dean. "If I ever see that bitch again, I'm gonna gank her."

"Come on," said John. "We need to get Hermione the basics. Might as well get you two clothing for the next year while we're at it."

"Yes, sir," chorused the boys.

They ended up going to the Salvation Army first followed by two further thrift shops. Hermione was loosed on the children's section of each with orders to find seven each of pajamas, trousers or some other form of leg wear, t-shirts, long sleeved shirts, and six dresses along with two sets of long underwear, two sweaters, and a pair of sweat pants and a shirt appropriate for gym class. Hermione had never been particularly interested in wearing trousers, having embraced Wizarding fashion with its flowing robes and long dresses. Mary had permitted her to wear skirts even on hunts so long as they were roomy enough for her to move in without her tripping over hems, claiming that both she and her grandmother-Deanna-along with most other female hunters throughout history had done the same before fashions had changed enough for them to wear jeans and other trousers without looking out of place.

With that in mind, she took John's instructions as guidelines, rather than rules, using Mary's standards for proper clothing. She found seven skirts, most somewhere between knee and ankle length in thick wool and comfortable cotton, although she picked up a denim mini-skirt. For her gym clothing, she found a pair of shorts for modesty, a jumper dress and a t-shirt for underneath. For the long sleeved shirts, she picked out sturdy, oversized flannel shirts in plaids that wouldn't clash too badly. The dresses were a bit more difficult, but she found appropriate and easy to care for wool and cotton dresses, along with one dress in jersey for Sunday mass and other special occasions.

While she was doing that, John found her a winter coat and a denim jacket. Within an hour everything was bought and they went to a chain store where Hermione found two packs each of underwear and socks, a couple sets of tights, leggings, slips, undershirts and a set of combat boots and a set of rain boots. She picked out a tooth brush, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, conditioner, a hairbrush, a comb, hair ties, barrettes and bobby pins while John watched, looking completely mystified by the necessities of female grooming habits.

Everything was put into a duffle bag John had gotten from somewhere and placed in the motel room. John, it seemed, either hadn't kept track of what she was getting, beyond making sure that it fit and wasn't too worn or perhaps didn't care. She had noticed that Dean had been the one tasked with supervising his own and Sam's shopping, so perhaps she would have been left to Dean's care if not for the fact that she literally had nothing and they'd never taken her shopping before. For lack of anything better to do, she and Sam watched a movie as she couldn't go in the pool with her cast and some of her stitches hadn't come out yet.

She pushed back a strand of too long hair before letting out an angry huff. Her hair was still ridiculously long. It might have been hip length on her seventeen year old body, but now it was nearly knee length. Hermione bit her lip and then pulled out a pair of scissors from where it was kept next to the sink.

"Dean, could you cut my hair? It's too long," she said.

"Alright," sighed the boy in a way which made it clear he was doing so under protest, "How much do you want off?"

"To here." She motioned to her hips.

He carefully brushed her hair out and then gathered it in a handful and cut it a little above her hips. "Let me just toss this."

She shook her head. "Burn it, don't throw it out. Do you know what a witch can do with a person's hair?"

In this world, those who bargained with demons for power were called witches, in her own, they were called sorcerers. She wasn't sure exactly where their history had split, but she was relatively sure it happened long before Mary's miscarriage. She thought it might have had something to do with Samhain, who even after being trapped had been responsible for the centuries of antagonism between the Wizarding and the Goblins. It had been a close call and though the Wizarding had survived Samhain, perhaps in this world they had not been so lucky. Obviously magic was still in the blood, as both Mary and John had existed in both worlds, but if there was no organized Wizarding culture or society, it would have been very easy for demons to pick them off.

"Didn't think of that," acknowledged Dean. "Right, let me get your cast covered and then you need to take a shower."

"Oh…" She glanced down. "I don't think I can…"

"Which one of us do you want to help you wash?" asked Dean.

She thought about John for a minute before dismissing the idea. That was not happening. "Can you help me?"

"Yeah. Might as well get this over with."

Dean grabbed her soaps, underwear, a nightgown, a hair tie, and a garbage bag and some tape. He taped the garbage bag over her cast to keep her arm protected before turning on the water and then helping her undress.

"Where did you get those scars?" said Dean, his voice deathly calm.

"Which one?" she asked.

"I don't know, all of them?"

"Oh, well this one is from when a witch cursed me," she said, pointing to the one from Dolohov. The stories were heavily edited, but would hopefully work well enough. "Mom sewed me up because we couldn't go to the hospital. This one is from a werewolf-I only got scratched, not bitten, so I'm alright. He was my gym teacher. That was about three years back-I was still going to the public school Marcus and Adrian went to back then. That's what private schools are called in the U.K." Gym was close enough to Defense Against the Dark Arts, she supposed. It was from Professor Lupin, the night she'd almost been eaten by a dementor and had broken Sirius out from jail. It had taken a while to heal, as all werewolf caused injuries did, but it hadn't interfered with her and Harry's rescue of Sirius and Buckbeak. "The rest of these are just from training."

"Your gym teacher was a werewolf," said Dean, seemingly stunned.

Hermione nodded rapidly. "Yes. He's really nice most of the time and he always locks himself up. He's been a werewolf since he was six. His father was a hunter and angered this other werewolf and that werewolf attacked and infected him in revenge. He became a hunter as well. Mom and Uncle Mark threatened him with guns and said that if he ever got loose while he was transformed again, they'd hunt him down and kill him."

"Oh. If he always locks himself up, how did he get out?" asked Dean, obviously keen enough to pick up the holes in her story.

"Ron and Harry and I got kidnapped by a man from a family of witches that he used to know and he came to rescue us." She tried to be careful to keep names out of it in case Dean wanted to send somebody to hunt Professor Lupin down, although Harry and Ron's names managed to slip out before she could stop herself.

Almost mechanically, Dean turned on the shower and fiddled with the temperature until it felt right. Remus Lupin was the only one of her teachers at Hogwarts who'd ever learned that her mother and "father" were hunters, not dentists, although he'd never been informed of their real names or anything else that could be used against them.

Dean had to get extra shampoo and conditioner as he'd underestimated how much her long hair required, but otherwise helped her bathe in silence. He toweled her dry and turned away while she dressed before sitting down, rubbing her hair with a towel and then brushing out her hair with the comb.

"Can you braid my hair?" asked Hermione.

"Uh… no."

"Alright," sighed Hermione. "Guess I have to wait until my arm's out of the cast."

"What's braiding matter?"

"It keeps my hair from tangling while I sleep."

Dean called down for an extra bed for the night before settling Hermione into the bed farther away from the door. When the bed was rolled in, it was set up in front of the door. Dean took that bed and told Sam he had the other one, in between himself and Hermione. He was taking the most vulnerable position, Hermione realized. He was trying to protect his younger siblings.

* * *

In the morning, Dean bundled up all of Hermione's things after she dressed before doing a last check of the room to make sure that nothing had been forgotten. He carried his own and Hermione's bags out to the car-a 1967 Impala Hermione was relatively sure had belonged to John in her own dimension as well, although Mary had left it behind when she'd gone to Scotland-putting them into the trunk before offering Hermione a piggyback ride to the car. Apparently the four of them were going to drive for an hour or two before stopping for breakfast, as John had found a hunt and wanted to complete it before the children were supposed to start school in the fall.

Hermione might be able to sleep anywhere, but she simply wasn't comfortable sleeping in the same room with unfamiliar people. It had taken her about seven months to warm up to her roommates at Hogwarts and she had never quite been able to get more than short catnaps when staying in Ginny's room when visiting the Weasleys' home. Other than when she'd been drugged, she hadn't managed to get a good night's sleep at the hospital at all. There were too many people in the room and too many people coming in an out regularly for her to be comfortable. She ended up turning Sam's arm into a pillow and falling asleep less than five minutes after the car started up.

"Get up," said Sam, while shaking her awake what felt like a minute later.

"Where are we?" she mumbled.

"Time for breakfast," explained Sam.

They were at a truck stop diner, one of the few cars in the parking lot. Mary had generally avoided places like this when Hermione had been a child, but she supposed that as the father of boys, John was not used to thinking about that sort of thing.

Hermione scrambled out of the car and stretched before taking Sam's hand and following him into the restaurant. It was incredibly demeaning, but she'd rather hold one of her brothers' hands than to risk some predator trying to grab her.

They were seated in a booth, Hermione squished on the inside next to John with Sam and Dean across from them. She read her menu happily enough, contemplating what to eat while Sam and Dean got into some sort of pushing fight.

"Boys, cut it out," said John.

"Are you folks ready to order?" said the waitress.

"Yeah," said John.

"Can I have a bacon and American cheese omelet with the French fries well done?" asked Hermione, before John could order for her. There was no way she'd let somebody else order for her when she could still speak. "Oh, and whole wheat toast, buttered."

"That comes with orange juice or milk, honey," she said.

"She'll have the orange juice," said John.

"Thank you," said Hermione, remembering her manners.

She yawned again before looking at the songs available in the small jukebox connected to their booth and all the other booths. Once everybody had ordered, John pulled out a folder and opened it, revealing a couple articles and what looked like faxes.

"What's the hunt?" asked Dean.

"Four people have gone missing in Heckscher State Park-that's on Long Island," explained John. "They left their cars, their possessions behind. It's tourist season and the park was full of people going to the beach, barbequing, but none of them saw anything useful. Each of them was either last seen taking one of the paths next to the beach, or, in the case of Jason Mitchell, he told his friends that was where he was going but was not seen on the path."

* * *


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

"Have you ever been to New York before?" asked Hermione, absently scratching at the skin under her cast.

"We've been to Jersey a couple times," said Sam, looking up from his book. "And New England a lot, but mostly we stay closer to the Rockies."

"Oh," said Hermione. "I've been to France-one of my aunts lived there and she used to call Mom and Uncle Mark for backup when she and her sons needed it, but mostly we stayed in the U.K. And we went to help Uncle Mark's friend, Uncle Alfred with a werewolf in Switzerland once. I got to go skiing."

"What's France like?" asked John, surprisingly calm despite the traffic and disturbingly frantic drivers with no regard for the law on the Jersey Turnpike.

"Nice, I guess," said Hermione. "My cousin was pregnant and couldn't hunt, so she took me around to sight see. It was kind of boring. She wouldn't take me to any of the museums because she said there were too many cursed and haunted objects and it was too dangerous for me or the baby." During later hunts she'd been permitted to participate, but the one she was speaking of had occurred when she was originally six.

"Another one?" said Dean. "You're infecting Hermione with your nerdiness."

"Shut up, jerk," said Sam.

"Bitch," Dean replied, almost playfully.

"How much longer until I get my cast off?" asked Hermione, changing the subject.

"A week and a half," said Dean. "We've already got you an appointment at South Side Hospital. It's right by the hunt."

"Hey, there's a Roy Rogers," said Sam, pointing to an upcoming rest stop.

"I have to go to the bathroom," she said pitifully, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere and her relative freedom as a "child." One of the issues of being stuck in a car with three males was that they never quite understood that she needed to go to the bathroom far more often than any of them did.

"Alright, alright," said John, putting on the blinker.

The car pulled into the parking lot and John parked it. They scrambled out of the car, Hermione forgoing grabbing one of her brother's hands this time. The parking lot was well lit and full of families. She stuck close to Dean until they got into the restaurant. She yelled at him that she didn't care what they got her to eat on her way to the bathroom.

Once she'd taken care of her business, she stepped back out. She pushed past a pair of what looked to be truckers-not hunters, they weren't armed enough-who were heading to the men's room and headed back toward the restaurant proper.

Something reached out, grabbing her about the waist a foot or so from the main room. In an instant, Hermione tried to use some of the self defense moves her mother had taught her over the years, only to realize that she was too small, too weak to make good use of them. Although she at least managed to make him remove his hand from over her mouth.

"Let go! Let go!" she screamed, trying to draw as much attention as possible. "Help! Help me!" Then she just started to scream, hoping it wouldn't be mistaken for the occasional screams children at play let loose.

The hand was back over her mouth a moment later. She managed to catch a reflection off the side of a vending machine, taking in the appearance of her captor even as she clawed at the hands holding her and tried to angle her foot so that she could kick him in the crotch. It was a middle aged man that actually would have looked like a nice, upstanding citizen if not for this kidnapping attempt.

"Hey!" shouted an unfamiliar male voice. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

The next minute or so would have been nothing but a blur to a normal seventeen year old girl, let alone an eight year old one, however Hermione had had quite a bit of experience with such situations over the years. To Hermione, it was clear that both of the truckers had come running out of the men's room at the sounds of her screams. They attacked before her kidnapper had a chance to react properly, Hermione falling to the floor as the men writhed about on the floor, wrestling more like participants in a tavern brawl than a proper fight. She edged a couple feet away as the men subdued her attacker.

A crowd began to form as the truckers tied him up with their belts, one of them calling out to the crowd to call the police. Hermione found herself shaking slightly as tears welled up in her eyes. She might be mentally and emotionally seventeen, almost eighteen, but her body was still that of an eight year old. Of course it affected her.

"Hermione!" yelled John, pushing through the crowd.

"Daddy?" she said, not quite able to keep the tremble from her voice.

She hadn't felt this helpless since that damn troll had trapped her in that bathroom her First Year. Hermione hadn't known any useful spells at the time and Mary had only permitted her to take a couple knives and no guns with her, believing quite rightly that her trunk would be searched. A knife was little use against a mountain troll. Now she might be able to use her magic, but at the moment, she wasn't capable of using any truly useful magic outside of the mind arts and telekinesis-which would not have been helpful in this situation as anything she might have done would have been far too obvious. She had no weapons, having been stranded in the world with literally nothing, and John had not yet seen fit to permit her to touch a knife, let alone a gun.

John picked Hermione up, putting her on her feet and checking her quickly for injuries. "Did he touch you?"

"He grabbed me and I scratched him and I screamed and they saved me," she said quickly, motioning toward the truckers.

"Dean, Sammy, take your sister to those benches," ordered John. "Has somebody called the cops yet?"

Dean made his way through the crowd, pulling Hermione to him and checking her over much like John had before she was pulled to the benches under the window opposite the bathrooms out to the side of the main room.

At the benches, Hermione sat down before curling into Sam's side, as Dean refused to sit down, instead standing protectively in front of them. Dean adeptly fended off the crowd while John talked to the truckers and from the look of it, got in a few shots while people studiously looked the other way.

Surprisingly, it was only ten minutes before a cop car pulled up. They'd probably been patrolling for traffic violations or some such, supposed Hermione.

She submitted to questioning, but refused to let go of Sam or allow Dean to walk off-not that he looked particularly interested in leaving. A minute or so after the cops arrived, paramedics showed up. They checked her over before pronouncing her a little bruised, but fine overall. There'd been some uncomfortable questions about her scars, before Dean had hissed at them about her kidnapping a month and change earlier. As soon as her attacker had been arrested and put in the back of the squad car, John had joined Dean in essentially standing guard over her and Sam.

The detectives, when they arrived, were quite accommodating, particularly as she'd already survived one kidnapping that summer. Even so, they had been kept there for hours answering questions. Although at least they'd had the convenience of food being sold a couple yards away.

They finally reached the motel on the side of Sunrise Highway-Sayv… something-or-another Motor Lodge-a little after two in the morning. Hermione had tried to sleep in the car, but after the second time she'd awoken from a nightmare, she gave it up as a lost cause. The first dream hadn't been so bad, merely a flashback to the troll attack. The second… the second dream had been of fire and death, leaving her to wake screaming. If not for Sam's fast reflexes, she might have managed to seriously injure him before she'd come back to herself.

The men had been rather grimfaced after that, but otherwise ignored her reaction. Sam had tried to comfort her, but she hadn't really been in the mood for it at the time.

"Hermione, you awake?" said John once he came back to the car from the front office. She could hear the jingle of keys, so presumably he'd gotten a room or two.

"Yeah," she mumbled.

In all honesty, she was beginning to wonder if it was her. At first she'd thought she'd merely found people who tended to get into trouble to be friends with. After everything that had happened, she had a feeling that maybe it was her. Maybe she was the one who attracted trouble. How many children went through that restaurant without somebody attempting to abduct them? Was she just some sort of trouble magnet?

Most hunters were trouble magnets to some extent. Something about being exposed to the supernatural as often as hunters were just made the monsters want to come after them. Perhaps it made the human monsters come after them as well.

Hermione allowed John to pull her out of the car and pick her up even though she was really too old physically to be carried like that. He balanced her against one hip before saying, "Grab the bags, boys."

A moment or so later Hermione was deposited on one of the twin beds in the motel room. As there wasn't a third bed, Hermione assumed that she'd probably be sharing with Sam or Dean. She was the youngest and the smallest, after all. She went to change and brush her hair and teeth before coming back to the main room.

"C'mon brat," said Dean. "You're bunking with me tonight."

"Don't call me brat," grumbled Hermione.

"Whatever," said Dean.

* * *

In the morning, the four of them headed out to the Connetquot Public Library to do some research. Hermione wasn't actually permitted to do much of anything to help and eventually, she decided to just check if there were any major differences she needed to know about between this world and her own.

Hermione grabbed a couple books which provided overviews of history and went to a table. With a pen and a legal pad in hand, she began to read. She took occasional notes about what Hermione was relatively sure were differences as she went, noting that although their history was almost identical, some things were wildly different. Creatures such as hippogriffs or unicorns, which had supposedly been created by Wizarding magic were considered mythical creatures. In her world, Muggles considered them mythical creatures as well, but there were a couple paintings and tapestries and the like which had been made from legitimate sources. It was a little odd, but she supposed it made sense. There may have been such creatures in this world, but they'd likely long since died out.

After checking the map of London, she found the land Diagon Alley had been built upon, which had not been hidden and warded by Wizarding in this world, making Charring Cross road much longer. There was no Godric's Hollow or Ottery St. Catchpole, both of which had been founded by Wizarding. Everywhere she checked, there was no sign of missing land suggesting that it had been warded and hidden.

At least the Muggle history of Minoa in this world seemed to be the same, meaning that it had likely happened in this world the same as it had in her own. Upon that realization, she worked forward from there, until she reached the fourth century, B.C. It seemed that although Samhain had been defeated, he had indeed managed to kill most of the Wizarding alive at that time.

With a defeated sigh, she moved on to reviewing history just to be sure that she knew what had happened and wouldn't sound too odd once school started up again. Hermione couldn't afford to let anybody know where she was really from or who her mother really had been.

The second day, she and Sam were dropped off at the library while John and Dean went to go interview witnesses. As they were pretending to be FBI agents-or perhaps reporters, it had been unclear-it would have looked odd for Sam and Hermione to come along with them. Hermione had no real desire to study history any further and was at a bit of a loss as to what to do with herself.

Finally, she picked up a couple study guides for seventh and eighth graders to see if she still remembered what she needed to know. Hermione would have entered her fourth year-or the U.S. equivalent of ninth grade-in the fall of 1991, if not for her acceptance to Hogwarts-having skipped several grades and been left back thanks to the series of events she'd told Sam and Dean about. She already had an eighth grade education, but it had been six years and she wasn't sure she remembered everything she needed. If nothing else, she might be able to skip ahead to the ninth grade with Sam, rather than having the repeat so many years of school.

Although considering how smart Sam and Dean both were, even with their constant travel they could easily have finished high school and begun university by now.

Hermione paused at that thought. Why hadn't they just done that? If they helped John hunt during the school year as well, they probably didn't have the time to study ahead to skip grades… And moving so much did make it difficult to be placed into proper classes each time one changed their school. She'd had to spend more than a couple weeks in classes far bellow her abilities until things were sorted out herself. Considering Dean's attitude, Hermione had a feeling he wasn't as interested in schoolwork as she and Sam were, either, which might have contributed to it.

Hermione spent the day reviewing, fully intending to draw such attention to herself her first day of school that the school would give her placement tests, perhaps some I.Q. tests as well. The only problem would be convincing John that she wasn't using her abilities to cheat, assuming that he even thought that.

On the third night at the Sayville Motor Lodge, her nightmares returned. It hadn't been so bad the first two nights. Although given that she'd essentially been unable to do more than doze between each time Dean so much as twitched in his sleep, it hadn't been particularly restful. But there was something about Dean, his scent, the familiar, comforting feel of his muscular body cuddling her to his chest and just the general feeling of safety that she'd not felt since her mother's death that lulled Hermione to sleep far sooner than sharing a room with Sam and Dean for less than two weeks should have allowed.

She dreamed of the basilisk, of the month she spent trapped, unable to move or breath, yet still completely aware. She hadn't been able to be still for longer than a couple minutes at a time since, always fidgeting, chewing on a sugar quill, knitting, doing something, anything to remind herself that she was not trapped, that she could move. Hermione didn't mean to, had no idea she even had that sort of power at her disposal, given the age of her body, but somehow her magic reacted, apparating her out of the bed she shared with Dean and across the room, between the dresser and the wall in the far corner of the room.

She sat there shaking, trying to catch her breath for several long minutes even as she played with the ends of her still damp hair, twirling and knotting it without a thought to how difficult it would be to brush it out later on.

There was a reason why apparition was not taught until the sixth year. A witch or wizard's magical core wasn't mature enough, strong enough to support such use until they were fourteen or fifteen, at least. Hermione gulped, trying to ease the feeling at the back of her throat even as she broke out in a cold sweat, a feeling of nausea overtaking her. There were sparks of light before her eyes as her head pounded.

"Wha?" said Dean.

Hermione barely noticed, too concerned reassuring herself that she was not petrified, with the feel of magical exhaustion. If she fainted without drinking or eating first, it would not be good. Without fuel, her body might end up in a coma.

"Hermione?" said Dean as he sat up, looking around desperately before turning the light on. "Brat, where are you?"

"Dean?" mumbled Sam, his voice surprisingly alert considering the time of night.

"Hermione's missing."

In an instant Sam joined Dean in his search. While Sam grabbed a gun and went to check outside the room, Dean finished searching the room. He went into the bathroom and turned the light before turning around, only to freeze as he caught sight of Hermione.

"Sammy, she's here," said Dean, calling their brother back.

"What are you doing?" demanded Sam, slamming the door behind him and locking it.

Dean glanced at Sam. The two shared a couple looks that would have spoken volumes if not for the fact that Hermione had no idea what they'd communicated with each other and no motivation to find out-at least not at the moment.

A moment later Dean folded himself up and sat down a couple feet away, leaning against the wall. Sam did much the same, sitting so that he leaned against the dresser.

"So, bad dream, huh?" said Sam.

Hermione just shivered even more violently. Oh, she was shaking. She hadn't even noticed that until now. The thought of her second year, of her petrification only brought worse memories to mind.

"So, what do we need to gank?" Dean asked casually.

Hermione took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm before shaking her head. "It's dead. It's already dead."

"Ah," said Dean. "What was it?"

Hermione shook her head again. She couldn't tell them about the basilisk. Only a witch or wizard could hatch them. There was no way it would still have been around so long after the collapse of Wizarding culture. Two and a half millennia was simply too long. As basilisks were sterile, they couldn't breed either.

"Can I-can I have some M&Ms?" she said instead. The sugar from the chocolate and the nutrients from the peanuts would help with the magical exhaustion.

"Yeah, sure," said Dean. He grabbed a bag out of his duffle bag with easy, confident steps that hid the concern Hermione could see in his eyes. He handed them to her before going back to his seat.

Hermione let go of her hair, grabbing the bag of candy and pouring some into her hand despite her dizziness. She busied herself with eating a couple of the candies.

"Dad wants to hunt him down and kill him, but he's too late," she said, not entirely sure why she was telling her brothers about this. "Mom and Uncle Mark had Aunt Tamar do something worse to him. It would be too nice to kill him now."

"Who does Dad want to kill?" asked Sam.

She'd been thirteen when she'd caught Lockhart putting Penny Clearwater under the Imperious curse. Lockhart might have been highly skilled at the mind arts, but over the years, Tamar had helped her reclaim the memory which had been manipulated by the man. Hermione had known since she was fourteen that her memory had been manipulated by Lockhart when she'd gone to get her permission slip for the Restricted Section signed and had been at a loss as to what had happened, as she was still a virgin, but it was not until the summer before her sixth year that she'd become skilled enough at the mind arts to unlock the memory of the attack she'd witnessed. Lockhart hadn't touched her-he preferred more... mature victims, but he'd petrified her and left her there, forced to watch while he assaulted Penny before manipulating both their memories and sending them on their way.

She still wasn't sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that she'd managed to have a relatively normal, if very physical relationship with Viktor before her memories had returned. At least she'd known what normal sex, normal relationships were like before then. Cormack actually hadn't been all that bad a boyfriend, but at the time she hadn't been able to deal with the requirements of a relationship, no matter how much she'd tried to pretend. Mary had arranged for her to speak to her great grandmother, Sorcha Campbell, who'd been attacked by an incubus before a hunter had managed to kill it, but honestly, she wasn't sure how much the informal therapy had done. Penny had need the therapy more than Hermione. She was the one who'd been attacked, after all.

Sorcha Campbell nee Ward had been from a family of Pavee or Irish Travelers and while she'd never been a hunter, she'd learned enough about the supernatural to survive after the incubus incident. She'd been a hunter's informant for years, her contacts within her family giving her access to information about possible hunts on a scale that was not widely available until after the advent of the internet, even with national and regional newspapers, before eventually marrying Robert Campbell-Samuel Campbell's father.

"What did they do to him?" asked Dean, after it became apparent that she was not going to tell them what Lockhart had done to her.

"He's like me-has powers like me and Aunt Tamar. He made me forget it happened," Hermione stated, trying to think of how to explain it even though she knew she wasn't exactly coherent at the moment. "He made lots of girls forget. He didn't touch me. He didn't do anything to me. I didn't mean to catch him hurting her, but I did. He made me watch what he did to her, and then he made us both forget. So Mom and Uncle Mark had Aunt Tamar make him forget." The misfired obliviate would have been reversible, if not for Tamar's intervention, not that the healers at St. Mungo's knew that. Before she'd done so, Tamar had gone into Lockhart's mind to find out how many other people he'd done such things to. Hermione was relatively sure Tamar had done what she could to help his other victims, but she'd honestly never asked. She hadn't wanted to know. "He doesn't even remember his name most days, let alone how to use his powers. He's in a mental institution and will be for the rest of his life.

"Tell Dad I broke my hymen when I was thrown through a wall by a ghost."

Hermione finished off the M&Ms silently before standing up. She ignored them, crawling back into bed and all but collapsing with exhaustion.

She started slightly when Dean joined her nearly twenty minutes later. She hadn't heard him and Sam talking, but assumed that they'd communicated somehow. She didn't know if they'd realized what she'd been talking about, but if they told John, then they'd like as not find out. She knew that her father had the same suspicions as the doctors and police had had, nevermind that some girls broke their hymens through activities like horse back riding or sports. Apparently the abuse her body had been through over the years had convinced them that the less innocent explanation was the truth.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm pretty sure nobody was expecting me to go this route. My reasoning for claiming Lockhart was capable of rape, in case you were wondering is that Lockhart admitted to going around obliviating people and taking credit for their deeds. And that's just what he was willing to openly admit-alright, he intended to obliviate Ron and Harry, but it was still a full villainous speech. Who's to say he didn't also do far, far worse things? As for why Hermione spoke of it, given that she'd just been placed in the role of the victim once more, was suffering from magical exhaustion, that she'd been having nightmares of being petrified, and that she was trying to calm herself, she made a mistake and revealed something she would likely never have otherwise told any of them. In case you were wondering, Hermione has gotten treatment. She has been to therapy-admittedly, the therapy consisted of speaking to Tamar and Sorcha, but she did have people to talk to about what she saw.


	6. Chapter 6

* * *

John had listened, his expression more closed off to Dean's explanation about the commotion from the previous night before giving a tight nod. This wasn't a surprise, Dean realized. This meant something to John. Dean knew what Hermione's story had sounded like, but he honestly hadn't wanted to believe it.

"Did he…" asked Dean.

"Make her watch while he raped some poor girl. From the sounds of it, yes."

"What are we going to do?" asked Sam. "She needs help-someone to talk to."

"She said this man messed with her memories!" snapped Dean. "Who the hell can she talk to about that? It's not like there are hunter psychologists."

The family motto and rule number one was "we do what we do and we shut up about it" for a reason. Hermione might find herself institutionalized if she said something wrong. He wouldn't risk having the girl exposed to that.

Hermione was several tables away, reading ahead from the look of the books spread out around her. She was smart, like they were, however her intelligence seemed centered on academics, like Sam, rather than more hands on… subjects like John and Dean. She absently chewed on the tip of a pen as she read.

That morning, Hermione had refused to acknowledge anything had happened the night before. Instead she'd been very focused on combing her hair and then braiding it into just the right style, even with one arm unable to help much at all, and then picking out just the right clothing to wear. For a moment, Dean found himself wondering if Hermione even owned a pair of jeans. But he dismissed that thought as unimportant a moment later. John had supervised her in the thrift stores. Surely he would have noticed if she'd disobeyed. She'd been even quieter than she had been after meeting the social worker that morning at breakfast, all but ignoring the family and even permitting John to order for her, something which Hermione had never done before. She was normally so pushy and opinionated.

Presumably, the three of them were searching for the monster-probably a ghost-which might have caused the disappearances, however they'd been derailed by Dean, who'd brought up Hermione's panic attack-or perhaps it had been a flashback.

"Let me think on it," said John, with a contemplative look on his face. "I might know somebody she can speak to. While I go make a call, you two get to work. This hunt won't research itself."

"Yes, sir," echoed Dean and Sam.

* * *

When the library was about the close, John walked over, obviously checking out her pile of books. He picked up one of the study guides for algebra and raised an eyebrow, before putting it back down again.

"C'mon, we're heading to dinner now."

"Yes sir."

Hermione packed up her notes and closed the books before following him out of the building. She smoothed out her skirt before following the group out of the library. They went to a small Chinese place just across Sunrise Highway, on the same side as the Motor Lodge. There was a McDonald's in the same little strip mall, but John insisted they eat something vaguely nutritional. Hermione ordered beef lo mein and egg drop soup with a promise to share with Sam if he gave her some of his sushi-apparently the restaurant served both Chinese and Japanese food. Once their takeout was ready, they piled back into the Impala and headed to the Motor Lodge.

The group settled into John's room to eat and go over the case. Once Dean and Sam finished fighting over whether or not the sushi was too girlie, the food was divvied up and John set out the folder on the case.

"Now, we think it's most likely the ghost of Anna Lunapiena, nineteen years old," explained John. He held up a picture of a pretty, dark haired girl. "She went missing two years back." He motioned for Sam to speak.

"She and her boyfriend, Zachary Kline were at Heckscher State Park when she went died. He claimed that she'd slipped and fallen on the pedestrian path from near Parking Field Eight and hit her head. They weren't supposed to be in the park, as it was after sunset and it supposedly took Kline an hour to find a park ranger," said Sam. He held up a picture of Kline. He was blond with brown eyes and in his late teens, early twenties, like the four victims had been, Hermione noted. "Family and police both suspected foul play, but there was no evidence, no body. He went to get help, and by the time they came back, at nearly four in the morning, Anna was nowhere to be found."

"Anybody have anything to add?" asked John.

She wasn't that surprised that John was using this technique. Most hunting families used group discussion to go over the hunt and the various possibilities for the monster's motives, the victim profile and so on as a way to teach children how to go about a hunt properly.

"Ah," said Hermione. "You think he killed her and disposed of her body there and she's trying to get revenge, but she's not very good at it and keeps mistaking other men for the one that murdered her. Do they just look like Kline, or do they act like him as well?"

"We do," agreed John. "We don't know about personality."

"Was Kline really looking for help or did he make that up on the spot when he was found by a park ranger?" said Dean.

"We'll interview Kline in the morning and try to find out before going to the park tomorrow to scout it out. While we're there, where do you and Sammy want to go?"

"Can we go to the bay?" said Hermione, glancing at Sam to make sure he didn't object to her request. "I saw on a map that it's walking distance from the main street and there's places for us to go and things to do. Well, main street is really Montauk Highway, but it turns into main street every time it goes through a town."

"Sam?" said Dean.

"Sounds good," shrugged the younger of her brothers.

* * *

That night, she dreamed of being strangled by plants. After waking the first time, Dean rubbed her back soothingly until she went back to sleep. The next dream was of hunting a djinn, which she'd done only once. It wasn't that bad, Hermione supposed. She'd killed the djinn much as she had the first time around and spent the rest of the dream helping the victims find their way home.

In the morning, John took them into Sayville proper and had them eat at a diner across the street from the local Roman Catholic church before leaving Hermione and Sam at the bay, ordering Sam to "look after" his sister.

The part of the bay set up for swimmers actually took up a very small area, with a marina to one side and open water to the other. As Hermione couldn't swim until her cast was off, she found she didn't really care. A dozen or so yards back from the bay was a playground full of children and behind that a tennis court. On the side with open water was a small park with a path through it and a picnic area.

Near the picnic area Hermione found a table with four concrete chairs attached. The table had an inlaid chess board and Hermione found herself giving Sam puppy dog eyes until he agreed to play. As he'd brought his chess pieces along with him, Hermione could only assume he'd intended to play from the beginning-although perhaps not against his younger sister. Hermione was not in Ron's skill range, but she was certainly better than Harry had ever been and more than good enough to present a challenge.

"Who taught you to play?" asked Sam, around their third game.

"Nobody, really," shrugged Hermione. "I just picked up what I needed to to avoid being destroyed by Ron. He was the best chess player at school."

"So Harry and Ron are you friends?"

"Yeah," Hermione said slowly, thinking about what to say. "Mom was alright about it. Harry's father was a good friend of my gym teacher-the one that was a hunter. And Ron's parents knew what was out there and made sure their kids did too, even if they didn't hunt. But they're in hiding because a witch is hunting them and I can't talk to them anymore because I might lead the witch to them."

"What witch?"

"The one that killed Harry's parents and Ron's uncles." She shrugged and changed the subject. There was only so long she could toe the line before she would go over it and she'd prefer not to contradict herself unless she'd no other choice. "Do you want to be on the hunt with Dad and Dean? I don't think babysitting me is all that much fun."

He shook his head. "I just… I feel like…"

And suddenly Hermione understood. "You feel trapped, like the only thing you can do is become a hunter."

"Stay out of my mind," snapped Sam.

"I didn't read your mind. My cousin Andy felt like that too."

"Oh. Sorry." At least he looked properly contrite.

"It's alright. Everybody thinks that psychics have to have read their minds. What's the problem you have with hunting?"

"It's just… don't you ever want normal?"

"Mom tried normal," revealed Hermione. "She tried to live normal from my birth until a couple months after Rosie died. Normal… normal isn't all that great."

"Rosie?"

"She was my younger sister. She was four months old when she died. I told you, Azazel killed her." Hermione shrugged. "Normal… normal doesn't work for people like us. Can you really live each day knowing there are people dying and you're doing nothing about it? How often will you read the paper and know that you saw something that might be a hunt, and then turn your back on those poor people the monster's going to kill because you want normal? Can you live always looking over your shoulder for a monster? Because just because you want nothing to do with the monsters doesn't mean the monsters want nothing to do with you."

"What do you mean?"

"Once you've encountered the supernatural, you're a thousand times more likely to encounter it again. Uncle Mark didn't become a hunter because of his first experience, but because he found himself in two others afterward without even looking for them."

"Hermione-"

"No. Even if Dad hadn't encountered a monster, they still would have eventually come after the three of you. And you're Mom… I wonder how many monsters she killed while she was a housewife. Because that thing that killed her probably wasn't the only one." Eight. According to Mary, she'd killed eight between her retirement and the fire, not that she could tell Sam that.

"You-"

"Mom was always finding hunts, even when she tried to be normal. She'd see a sign that some monster was somewhere, and she'd tell her family and they'd take care of it. Are you so selfish that you'd just leave innocent people to die because you don't even want to research hunts and pass them on to other hunters? There are some things… once you know, you can't unknow. The supernatural is one of those things. Every second you're living that apple pie life, you'll know that somewhere out there, there are monsters killing people, there might even be monsters coming after you and your girlfriend. Except you're normal, and normal people don't know about the supernatural. They don't know how to protect themselves from the monsters."

* * *

Sam glanced back at Hermione, just to make sure she was safe. The girl was curled up in one of the back corners of a booth in the pizza parlor, eating a second slice of cheese pizza and slowly working on a couple garlic knots.

He wanted to punch somebody, but the only target was an eight year old, and he had no intention of touching her. Hermione was so much like their father… She didn't understand. She probably couldn't understand. Hermione had been raised by a hunter. That woman-Joan, or whatever her name was-had probably brainwashed her like John had brainwashed Dean into believing that hunting was the only way.

Only John had a cell phone at this point, but it was easy enough to commandeer the restaurant's phone with no one the wiser. He dialed a number known by heart.

"Singer Salvage," said a gruff voice.

"Uncle Bobby?"

"Sam, what's wrong-"

"Nothing," Sam quickly reassured him. "I just… I just wanted to ask you something."

"Yeah?"

"I just…" He paused, struggling to decide what to ask, how to word his question. "Can… can somebody retire from hunting and live a normal life?"

* * *

Hermione hadn't wanted to do it, but she'd known that Sam needed to hear what she had to say. If he was under the delusion that he could have something remotely resembling a normal life, he put not only himself, but the rest of the family in danger. That was the sort of crack in a person's psyche that a demon could use to possess him. Worse, that was the sort of thinking that could make him sloppy, that could make him careless. If he made a mistake on a hunt, he would put not only himself, but whoever he was hunting with and any nearby civilians in danger.

The closest thing to normal any hunter could truly have was a family, a home base, and possibly a part or full time civilian job. To live a civilian life was to risk getting rusty, to risk letting your skills slide until you were unable to protect you and yours. Hermione would not stand by and watch while Sam married and had children, only to have that nice civilian wife, those helpless civilian children die because he wasn't able to take on the monsters anymore, because he simply wasn't vigilant enough.

She'd seen it happen before to people she cared far less about than her brother. Hermione wouldn't sit back and watch it happen again.

It was obvious that Sam still hadn't forgiven her for her words. He'd been silent all afternoon, begrudgingly buying her lunch at the pizza place on main street, but otherwise ignoring her almost entirely, even going so far as to spend a good half hour in the bathroom of the pizza place rather than be around her.

"Sammy, Hermione, there you two are," called out Dean, stepping out of the Impala a moment after it pulled up in front of the Carvel's off main street.

"Hi Dad, Dean," said Hermione as Sam grunted.

They piled into the car and headed off down main street until they found an Italian restaurant to get takeout from. From her experience, John tried to change up what they ate each time so that food didn't get too repetitive. Hermione found herself wondering if they ever stayed in apartments, or at least motel rooms with kitchenettes, because she was getting tired of eating out all the time.

She'd forgotten how annoying it was to eat out for all your meals, particularly when you had to keep within a budget. Spending ten months out of the year and most of the summer with either the Weasleys or Hogwarts had spoiled her in some ways. She'd still gone on one or two hunts a summer with Mary, just for the experience so that she'd know what to do if she found a hunt on her own, but most of the time Mary had been content to let Hermione go to school. Although she had encouraged Hermione to get involved with all of Harry's little adventures, claiming it was excellent practice and that as Hermione was the only one with true hunting experience, it was her job to make sure Harry and Ron didn't get killed doing something stupid.

John held Hermione back when they got to the motel. Sam and Dean carrying the food into the room. "Is something wrong?"

"No," said Hermione.

"Because it looks like there's something wrong between you and Sam," he continued, ignoring her denial.

"I just… I told Sam something he didn't like."

"What did you tell him?"

"Why once you've been a hunter, you can't do normal. My cousin Andy tried. His wife Lorelai and two of their children-Lizzy and Janey-were killed by vampires in revenge for Andy killing one of their mates. Andy only managed to save his daughter Kitty. Mom tried normal too, until the demon killed Rosie. And she still found and went on hunts, when she didn't pass them on to family."

"Sloppy. Everybody knows a vampire hunt isn't done until the entire nest is dead."

"Mom said his apathy caused him to be less thorough than he should have been."

"Did you tell Sam about what happened to your family?"

Hermione shook her head. "I asked him if he was willing to turn a blind eye to any hunt he might spot, even when pretending to be normal."

John took this in for a moment before nodding. "I heard vampires were more of a problem in Europe. They're nearly extinct in North America."

"Yeah."

"Go eat."

"Yes sir."

* * *

Hermione yawned, wondering what had woken her. On the opposite bed lay Sam, staring at her. Dean seemed to be asleep, but Hermione wasn't sure. He was probably skilled enough to fake it.

"I heard what you said to Dad," whispered Sam. "That… that really happened?"

"Yeah. Kitty stayed with me and Mom for a while after… Then she went to live with Gram-she was a hunter's informant before she married my great grandfather. Kitty was never quite… right after what the vampires did."

Hermione shook her head. She still remembered Slughorn's little stunt, bringing Sanguini or whatever the hell that vampire was called to the Christmas party. She'd been even more adamant about attending Slug Club meetings afterward, just to keep an eye on the man, as he was obviously dangerously stupid and/or reckless. Hermione had had a bit of an adventure, but she'd managed to find some dead man's blood and kill both Sanguini before he left Hogwarts, disposing of the body just outside the acromantula nests. She'd killed his mate as well, although it had taken her a couple days to track the woman down.

"I'm not saying you need to keep hunting, I'm just saying… you can't pretend the supernatural isn't real," explained Hermione. "It just… that sort of thing gets the person trying for normal and everyone around them hurt. You don't need to research hunts or have anything to do with hunters and hunting. You just can't let your guard down. That's how people get killed."

"Oh."

Sam rolled over and curled up, presumably to go to sleep. It was alright. Hermione didn't mind. She knew she'd given him a lot to think about.

* * *

This day she and Sam had been dropped off at a small strip mall with a Toys 'R Us on one end and a supermarket on the other, an arcade somewhere in the middle. With only one hand, Hermione couldn't play many of the games, but she and Sam had a bit of fun playing air hockey for a couple hours.

After lunch, Hermione broached a subject which had been on her mind since the petrification dream. There was a reason why she was always knitting, and it wasn't entirely because of the house elves themselves. Hermione's main reason for starting SPEW was that wizards had perverted the bond between house elves-also known as brownies-and the humans they chose to serve, all but enslaving the creatures and often abusing them as well. Even though some rather silly urban legends said that house elves fed off the magic of wizards and would die without them, that was not the truth. It was just propaganda used to justify house elf enslavement. Hermione had taken up knitting at Sorcha's suggestion because it was a way for her to keep moving without obviously fidgeting, particularly when she had her bad moments, while still allowing her to look normal. That it aided her attempts with SPEW had only been an added benefit.

"Dad gave you money to buy me some toys, right?" said Hermione.

Sam nodded. "Yeah."

"Could… could we go across the street to the Joanne Fabrics instead?"

"Across the street where?" Sam asked suspiciously.

"Not across Sunrise. That way, on the other side of the street from the Toys 'R Us."

"You sure you don't want a toy?"

"No, thanks."

"Alright," sighed Sam. "What do you want in a fabric store, anyway?" he asked as the walked out of the building.

"I like to knit. Reading in a car makes me carsick, but knitting doesn't."

"Oh."

It didn't take long to walk over to the store and back to the yarn section. Hermione spent what must have been an hour looking at yarn and comparing colors, thinking about color combinations while Sam watched, obviously bored.

"What do you think?" she asked, finally holding up a ball of worsted weight wool-acrylic blends in a color changing green, cream, and pink, along with a skein of yarn in a nice, contrasting dark green. The yarn was relatively cheap and would hopefully be warm enough.

"What are you going to make?"

"Hat and scarf. I was thinking about doing a vest or a shawl in that yarn." She motioned toward the color changing purple yarn in varying shades and another in a contrasting shade in dark gray, this in thin double knit weight, rather than bulkier worsted. "Do you think I should make hats and scarves for you and Dad and Dean as well?"

"I think they'd like that," Sam said after a moment of thought. "Did your mom teach you to knit?"

"No, Gran did. When we… she taught me to knit and to sew." It had been Sorcha's preferred form of therapy for Hermione after she'd found out about the basilisk. "How much can I get?"

"Well, all that you've already picked out is about twenty, so another thirty."

"Thanks. Help me pick colors."

A skein each of dark teal and rich brown yarn was chosen for Sam, as he wanted stripes of each color. For Dean, they picked out a green and tan color changing yarn and she intended to use the skein of dark green picked out for her own hat and scarf for contrast. For John, they found an actual skein color changing yarn in the colors of woodland camouflage used by most of the armed forces. Hermione had joined Sam in laughing, but they'd agreed on it. Hermione selected two sets of knitting needles-one for worsted weight, one for DK weight-a set of plastic yarn needles, and seeing that with tax, there was enough left in the budget, she grabbed a pack of embroidery needles, a handful of handkerchiefs, an embroidery hoop, and bundles of embroidery floss, five white, five black. She might as well embroider protective symbols into the hems of their clothing and make some portable wards while she had the chance.

They wandered back to the strip mall they'd been stopped at, heading over to the Blockbusters to pick up some movies to watch that evening. Sam wasn't exactly happy about her choice in the various Evil Dead movies, but had agreed that the series was both fun to watch and hilarious to anybody who knew what they were doing. In that vein, he found a copy of Poltergeist, which was always more humorous than frightening.

They were waiting in the arcade when Dean and John came to pick them up. They watched Evil Dead one and two that night, throwing popcorn at the television and correcting pronunciation and pointing out plot holes all the while.

* * *

The next day was spent at the library while John and Dean went back to Heckscher, attempting to locate Anna's ghost and ascertain whether or not she was the source of the supernatural activity. Hermione managed to finish reviewing and make sure that she remembered everything important while Sam read Anna Karenina.

Once back in the room, they ate silently while they watched Dean and John debate how to find Anna's body, as they were unsure of where it had been disposed. It wasn't like Kline would have let anybody know where it was. Not if he wanted to be sure that he wouldn't go to jail for her murder.

After dinner, Hermione settled in to watch the last movie in the Evil Dead series and then Poltergeist with Sam while John and Dean continued their hunt. In her left hand she balanced a blue handkerchief stretched over the embroidery hoop. With her right hand she embroidered the enochian runes for a basic warding scheme that would ensure demons and most other supernatural nasties neither noticed the residents of a room-although it only worked while they were in the room itself-or saw the room itself while in place. It was one of the older set of wards around, but still popular among Wizarding in her world because it worked well. The way it worked was that a stone with the rune array was placed at each corner of a building or a fence. Many of the Wizarding had been nomads, and this rune array worked just as well embroidered into cloth or even drawn on walls as it did carved into stone. Hermione chose to embroider it because it kept her hands busy and it was easily portable, unlike other methods. Not to mention that if she started painting it on walls, somebody would notice and word would eventually get back to the monsters.

"What is that?" asked Sam.

"They're protective sigils," explained Hermione. "Ron's mom taught me how to make them and Mom and Aunt Tamar both said they worked."

"What do they do?"

"They hide tracts of land and anything or anyone on the land from the senses of demons and most other monsters. Though you should still use the usual protections as well, because it doesn't work on the really powerful monsters. If there are two rooms, side by side, you could use only four of these, one in each of the far corners and cover both. Or a house would only need them on each floor in the proper corners."

"What are we supposed to do, bring in scent hounds or ground penetrating radar?" said Dean, his voice rising.

"Huh. Can you make anything else like that?" asked Sam.

"I want to put protective sigils on our clothing when I'm done with these."

"They already brought in scent hounds, the first time around," pointed out John.

"So what, we call in a psychic to find her body?" snorted Dean.

Dean and John froze before turning to look at Hermione just as Tangina Barrons appeared on screen.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that this chapter has been posted, the story is at the same point as it is elsewhere, so I'll start posting new chapters soon.
> 
> Original Author's Notes: So, Sam get's a bit of a reality check. I'm not getting into the conversation between Sam and Bobby right now. I might explain what Bobby said at some point in the future, but not right now. Let's just leave it at he got a wakeup call.


End file.
